


Dies Irae

by plumedy



Category: Rivers of London - Ben Aaronovitch
Genre: Aftermath of Violence, Book 4: Broken Homes, Case Fic, Friendship, Gen, Hurt/Comfort, Not Beta Read, Spoilers
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-02-21
Updated: 2014-04-04
Packaged: 2018-01-13 08:04:21
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 7
Words: 22,789
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1218754
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/plumedy/pseuds/plumedy
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>
  <i>"We have a bit of a problem," said Nightingale. "With the town of Cricklade."</i>
</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Guess who's back! 
> 
> This work is going to be a major goddamn AU the instance the fifth book comes out. Also, Cricklade is a fictional location (although some of it is borrowed from this other fandom of mine).
> 
> Feel free to point out any mistakes - I'll be grateful if you do.

There had always been that question in the back of my mind, that faint curiosity, even when Nightingale had first introduced me to the whole Shinto-esque phenomenon of ‘nature spirits’. I knew that the rivers were not the only ones, nor the only kind. And the more experience I gained in dealing with magic, the more kinds of magical beings I learnt of. The world around me was alive with living things like some particularly wormy apple.

First, there had been Mother and Father Thames, of course. Then we – Nightingale, Lesley, and I, that is – had chased down a spirit of mischief. Thanks to a lucky guess I had taken during that case, ever since then I had had a vague knowledge that Lady Justice of the Old Bailey might be something more than a whole lot of bronze (which was an intriguing idea, but one even I did not care to turn into an experiment). After that, I had met Sky; and there were others, undoubtedly, many, many others – millions, maybe. Maybe more.

And I had always thought, in the world where every goddamn blade of grass seems to have some sort of divine patron, how come nobody ever encountered any guardian spirits of _cities_? Shouldn’t there be an Uncle Edinburgh – or an Aunt Oxford? There must be an awful lot of magic accumulated in these stones.

“Tutelary deities,” Lesley had told me once, “seem to appear when there is real power. Oxford is thirteen centuries old, and that’s if we are being generous. Thames is fifty million years old. _Fifty million_ , Peter. Who cares about your pathetic Radcliffe Camera? Or the Bodleiana? They could be destroyed tomorrow for all Father Thames cares.”

“Yeah,” I had murmured. She had sounded strangely lofty to me, very Nightingale-ish, probably because we both had been kind of drunk. _Tutelary deities_. “Maybe justice is just as old as Thames, then. Sweet.”

 

“We have a bit of a problem,” said Nightingale.”With the town of Cricklade.”

I guiltily swallowed down the last bite of my sausage roll and turned to him. The morning was devilishly cold, and I hadn’t had any kind of breakfast prior to being dragged out of the Folly to deal with a minor emergency in the form of a flying notebook. Neither of these facts helped my attention span.

“Yes, sir?”

“It refuses to sink,” he said. “He refuses to sink.”

“Hey, no wonder,” I plumped out automatically. “He? The town of Cricklade? Refuses to sink? Sir?”

I imagine I must have sounded like a script returning a critical error message, because Nightingale’s eyes twinkled with amusement.

“Yes, I have quite forgotten that you are unaware of his existence. Or of the existence of any other genii urbium, for that matter.”

“Genii urbium,” I repeated dumbly. “City spirits. They are like the rivers, aren’t they?”

“Mm. Not really. They are not nearly as sensitive to physical changes as the rivers – you can imagine what building demolition would have done to them had it not been so. But they are very sensitive to _mental_ changes – to the mood of their inhabitants, the emergence of new cultural currents. If that makes sense.”

“Oh, yes, it does,” I said, and thought of all the vestigia that had felt like the texture of period clothes or furniture, like the smell of old cigars and the taste of drinks from the Roaring Twenties. The magic of culture. “Why have you never told me this before?”

“I’m not Scheherazade to tell you every story I know,” shrugged Nightingale. “It wasn’t relevant.”

“I see,” said I. Not that I found his argument particularly convincing, but I saw that he was reluctant to discuss the topic.

“Now, back to the problem we are to solve,” he continued, with some measure of dryness. “As you now know, Peter, guardian spirits of cities are a kind of genii locorum. Most, if not all, cities have them, and so does Cricklade.”

“You may or may not be aware of the situation with sea level rise that causes considerable trouble in some coastal cities, Cricklade being one of these.”

"The lost city of Cricklade,” I said. “There was a project in 2008. I remember, sir.”

I had little idea as to why I remembered it, especially since it had had absolutely nothing to do either with the Job or with any of the various and sundry things I had been interested in back in 2008. I could only suppose that the footage shown by the BBC Oceans had somehow stricken my imagination.

“Yes, that.” We had rounded the corner and were approaching the Folly, the sun shining straight in our faces. Nightingale squinted. He looked sullen now; I knew that what he was about to tell me would not be to my liking. “The city is still in some danger of being destroyed by the sea. And the current genius urbi has just expressed his extreme discontent with the fact. As it happens, he is threatening to do harm to civilians if the local authorities do not start a project for restoring the underwater part of the city and securing the rest of it so as to avoid further sinking.”

“Restoring the underwater part?” I stared at him incredulously. “I’m pretty sure that’s impossible. And even if it were not so, the cost of the project would be, like – they could buy the state of Liechtenstein with that sum.”

“True,” agreed Nightingale, with a kind of sourness that confirmed my worst suspicions. “Which is why we are going to parley with him.”

He walked up the small front staircase of the Folly, every step punctuated with a quiet click of his cane against the faded marble, and stood there, looking down at me. I had to admire his perfect obliviousness to how dramatic the scene was.

“Did they consider evacuating the civilians?” asked I.

“Evicting them from their houses for an indefinite amount of time? Under what excuse, pray tell?”

He was right, of course. I could only suppose it was the lack of breakfast that prompted me to pose that question.

“Right,” I said. “There are only us, then.”

“There are only us.” Nightingale smiled at me.

I followed him with my eyes as he turned around and disappeared in the hall, and then went to find Molly. Maybe she’d give me something if I asked nicely enough – she did, after all, have a whole lot of Yorkshire puddings left from the last Sunday dinner, and there wasn’t much opportunity to dispose of them other than to feed them to me.

Come to think of it, life in the Folly still went on in a manner that would have been far more appropriate if there were a vast number of people inhabiting and visiting the place; Molly’s uncontrollable passion for banqueting, Nightingale’s perfectly formal manner, the sheer size of the rooms, the number of books in the library would have all made more sense had there been a hundred young and hungry apprentices eager to mess around with some obscure formae in their spare time.

No wonder I felt a little lost. It was a pity Nightingale would never agree to train another hundred people.

 

I rounded the corner and opened the kitchen door a little. It was strangely dark, though there was some muffled light coming from the right, just enough for me to make out the cutlery on the table.

“Molly,” I called.

At first, nothing happened, and I started doubting if going inside would be a wise course of action. Molly could be doing something she didn’t want me to see – and chances were I wouldn’t want to see it, either.

When I almost decided to forget about the Yorkshire puddings, there was a sound of hurried footsteps, and a moment later the kitchen was flooded with light.

I blinked in confusion.

In front of me there stood Molly, holding a steaming plate, a thermos, and something unidentifiable wrapped in brown paper. I blinked some more; neither of us moved. I stepped aside. She frowned, shoving the plate into my hands, and I dropped my gaze to it. It was a Sunday roast, the Yorkshire puddings, young carrots, gravy, and all.

“Do you want me to take it to him?” I asked. “As much as I appreciate the necessity, I really don’t think it’s a good idea for me to do it. He isn’t going to like it.”

Her frown deepened, and she exhaled heavily through her nose.

“No way,” I said, incredulously.

Molly looked as though she were about to explode, and I realized that I was tempting fate. I quickly took the plate away from her and sat behind the table, still looking at her. I would have started eating immediately, but I suspected she would be pissed off if I spoke with my mouth full; and I needed to speak to her now. Admittedly there wasn’t much chance of her giving me any valuable information, but asking couldn’t hurt.

“Do you know anything about Nightingale’s plans?” I tried. Molly wrinkled her chiseled white nose.

“I see. No, of course I’ll ask him. It’s just that I talked to him not half an hour ago, and he said nothing about going anywhere.”

She raised an eyebrow, one of her eyes widening, queerly, while the other one remained narrowed.

“Just a guess? I trust your intuition, though. Did he tell you about the Cricklade affair?”

Molly wasn’t going to dignify this one with an answer, and I sighed, turning my attention to the carrots. Out of the corner of my eye I could see her walk around the kitchen, heading for the door.

“Thank you,” I said.

Her bare feet kept pattering on the floor and away from me.

 

It turned out Molly had guessed right, and some three hours later I found myself in the front seat of the Jag, dressed in my Met vest and feeling like an idiot. I had slipped the vest on without giving my outfit a second thought, but now I began to have doubts if it had been an entirely reasonable choice for what seemed to be about to turn into an undercover operation involving copious amounts of delicate negotiations.

I cast a sidelong look at Nightingale. Apart from having one of his suits on, he wore a pair of leather gauntlets – the proper kind, made of classy black leather and with a quirk at the base of each finger. Those are the ones you use to hook up with girls, I thought. Or boys. Except I really wasn’t sure if Nightingale was interested in either.

“Are we going undercover, sir?” ventured I.

“What?” He swung the wheel sharply to the right, turning onto the A12. We were out of town now, and there was very little traffic in our direction, what with it being a Monday. “Undercover? God forbid, Peter. Not in this car. On the contrary, we ought to be very conspicuous. We’ll stress the fact that we are police officers in every way possible. No dubious half-legal methods, not unless it is absolutely necessary. We must avoid provoking him.”

“Oh,” I said. “All right.”

The vest was far more appropriate than any civilian clothes, then. More appropriate than any _modern_ civilian clothes, at any rate – Nightingale was sure to make a suitable impression regardless of whether there was anything that made him resemble a policeman.

It was a two hours’ drive, and I’m not terribly good at making small talk, which is why I mostly sat in silence, observing the changing landscape on my left. We passed Chelmsford, a little town composed mostly of red-brick semis and with a church spire sticking up into the faded blue sky. Nightingale lowered the window, and I caught a whiff of wild rose and hot tarmac as we crossed the last streets and were out on the A12 again.

It did not feel like vestigia, though – just a smell.

I wondered as to what kind of genius loci Chelmsford would have, even though from experience I knew it to be a perfectly pointless question. Looks didn’t seem to play much of a part in determining who would become the god of what. In fact, sometimes I had suspected that the choice was random: once somebody found themselves in the right kind of circumstances in a particular location, the location just tried to snatch them like a frog snatching a fly.

I wondered if it was possible for a location to make a wrong choice.

Sometimes I just wonder too fucking much about things, as Lesley had been fond of saying.

“Sir?”

Nightingale raised an eyebrow.

“What is Oxford like?”

He frowned a little.

“You’ll meet her, sooner or later. Then you’ll see for yourself. There are almost a thousand towns in England, and almost every one of them has a genius loci – and most villages, too.”

“Wow,” I said. “That’s impressive. Her?”

“Yes.” Nightingale paused. “Aunt Oxford. She’s a little like Miss Marple, a very canny lady.”

 

We ended up sharing a room.

“I hope you don’t mind,” Nightingale had said. “You see, it isn’t that the Folly is suddenly short of money. It’s just that I’d like to be close if things start to happen.”

“ _Things_.”

“Yes.”

And now I lay in the darkness, slack spots of red and yellow light sliding along the ceiling above my head and disappearing in the corner. There was an incessant soft patter outside: the day’s dead heat had ended in a rain, and that one part of my brain that was responsible for memorizing useless facts reported that such abrupt transition meant a windy day tomorrow. I asked myself whether wind was capable of affecting formae. Would _impello_ be more effective if cast in the direction of the wind?

 _You wonder too fucking much about things_ , said a voice in my head.

I turned my head and looked at Nightingale. He lay on his back, ramrod straight, his arms folded on his chest. But he wasn’t asleep.

“Sir?” I called in a whisper.

“Peter?”

“Who is London?”

“What do you want, his name?” grumbled Nightingale. “It would tell you nothing. Go to sleep.”

I sighed.

“Good night, sir.”

“Good night.”

He still lay on his back in that Terminator pose of his, and his duvet was as smooth as if he had somehow contrived to make his bed after climbing into it. It wasn’t an impossibility, either. Such a spell would have been more useful, at least, than the one that created a small raincloud following you everywhere you went.

I couldn’t help smiling. Thankfully, he couldn’t see that.

It was strangely calming to sleep in the same room with Nightingale. Not merely because _things_ might start to happen, but also because there was something inherently pleasant, soothing in hearing his deep regular breaths a couple of feet away from me.

I know, it’s weird. Maybe I was being a bit touchy-feely there.


	2. Chapter 2

I half-expected to be woken by Nightingale, but instead it was a phone call from Stephanopoulos, of all people, that interrupted my sleep at seven in the morning.

“Constable Grant here,” I murmured hoarsely. My mouth felt like it was full of cotton.

“Hullo, Peter,” said Stephanopoulos, and I winced at the cheerful loudness of that overbearing voice. God, did she have nothing else to do at this hour?

“Yes,” I said.

“How’s it going? Are you sure you don’t need any reinforcements? We could ask the locals to assist you with whatever it is you are doing in that hole of a town.”

“It’s quite pretty, actually,” said I, casting a bleary glance at the window. I had not yet had a single proper look at the place, but I wanted to spite Stephanopoulos. She responded with a meaning snicker that implied that her opinion of Cricklade had just worsened; because clearly whatever Peter Grant approved of was bound to be shit.

“You stop that giggling, Grant,” snapped she. “Do you or do you not need our help?”

“Ask him. I’m the junior officer, the decision isn’t mine. But I seriously doubt you can do anything to help us. We’ve got… _stuff_ here.”

“ _Stuff_.”

“He prefers to call it _things_ , but I don't think it should be a countable noun.”

I think I heard her sigh.

“Okay. Tell Albus Dumbledore to contact me if he thinks we can help. I couldn’t reach him yesterday.”

“Right,” I said, and hung up. It occurred to me that the Skygarden incident must have had some impression on those who knew of the Folly’s work; it had been the first of a kind, after all. The Covent Garden riots had been bad, but they were riots, and ultimately they had served no purpose other than to create a situation of emergency. Skygarden, on the other hand, had been quite literally blown up in order to enable some random bloke to make billions of quid in large-scale industry.

When I was about to huddle under my blanket, my gaze fell on Nightingale, and I realized that he had been wide awake the whole time. His clear grey eyes were fixed on me, and upon seeing me look at him he raised his eyebrows a little.

“Stephanopoulos,” I explained. “She asked if we need help.”

Nightingale regarded me with some surprise.

“How thoughtful of her,” he said, and I grinned in response. He was clearly following the same train of thought I had just gone through. “I'm not being ironic, Peter. If it comes to evacuating people, we’ll want the locals to listen to us. But we’ll see soon enough.”

With that, he sat up and ran his hand over his face.

“We might as well get on with it. I haven’t seen the god of Cricklade in years; and I want to know what we are dealing with.”

 

It pleased me to discover that what I had told Stephanopoulos was true. Cricklade was not what you’d call a dreary small town. Granted, it was no Venice, but the sunken coast and the grey breakers rising against the ruins that were not yet fully underwater gave it a certain Gothic charm. The surviving buildings were the same red brick I had seen in Chelmsford; and they were semis, too, but not the twentieth-century kind – I thought they must have been Edwardian, what with the tall, tower-like chimneys and the fancy white windowpanes.

Nightingale seemed to be quite enamoured with the scenery, though he paid little attention to the architecture. The profusion of trees and bushes of all kinds must have been to his liking. His continuous efforts to teach me botany had borne some fruit, too – I was proud of being able to recognize some of the most common species – but I found his fondness of flora a little strange. Maybe it had something to do with his nostalgic attitude towards the times when botany had been one of the applied sciences.

“Does he live in one of these houses, sir?” asked I, glancing around with curiosity.

“As a matter of fact, yes,” answered Nightingale, squinting in the wet sea wind. His cheeks were a little flushed, and I could hardly believe my eyes when I saw that he looked slightly nervous. “He likes to pose as a regular citizen. Unlike the rivers, genii urbium tend to blend in with the crowd.”

“Do you think he’s dangerous to us?”

He lingered, and I didn’t like it at all.

“He might be,” he said at last. “But he’ll do no harm to you as long as you are with me. I swore to protect you, remember? He’d have to kill me first, and I daresay it would take some effort on his part.”

It was very Nightingale to be all eloquent about this question. What I had meant to ask was if I should expect heavy things being thrown at me, more or less, even if my definition of “heavy things” included everything from an iron to a tower block. But of course he had to take it too seriously.

“I don’t doubt that,” I replied.

Before Nightingale could give me an appropriately sarcastic response, in front of us there appeared a high brick fence (in fact, I came dangerously close to colliding with it and was only saved by Nightingale’s grabbing me by the shoulders).

“Peter,” Nightingale drawled reproachfully. “Preventing you from being harmed by magic, yes. Preventing you from walking face first into walls, no.”

“But in fact,” he continued, while I dusted myself, somewhat embarrassed, “you happened to choose the very house we need. I wonder if there isn’t some kind of glamour at work. They do tend to make people inattentive.”

He walked through a small wicket, looked around, and headed straight for the front door, his silver-top clutched in one hand. I followed him with some apprehension. It was, in agreement with what he had told me earlier, yet another Edwardian semi, and there was nothing at all unusual about it; but you know how it is when you are about to enter a house with a pissed off god in it.

What alarmed me the most was the fact that I could feel no vestigia. There was nothing at all, just a bit of wet cement and something that vaguely reminded me of curry. It was a striking contrast to what I had experienced whenever I had approached Mama Thames or any of her daughters.

Nightingale knocked.

“Who is it?” came a shrill voice from inside the house. “I want to see no one!”

“Detective Inspector Thomas Nightingale of the Metropolitan police,” said Nightingale, contriving to raise his voice while still sounding icily polite. “And Constable Peter Grant. We have come to talk to you about-“

“-I know what you have come to talk to me about.” The door opened abruptly, and I saw a gaunt man in his sixties. His face was inches away from Nightingale’s now, and he was sneering unpleasantly, his bright green eyes narrowed. But I still felt no vestigia, only some confusion at the realization that the guardian spirit of Cricklade looked like an angry Doc Brown. “And I’m damned if I like it. I don’t know what you are hoping to achieve, Thomas; I stated my demands clearly enough.”

“Peter, meet William Trevelyan, the god of Cricklade,” said Nightingale tersely, not moving an inch. “I’d be grateful if you invited us inside, William. Contrary to what you seem to believe, we do have something to discuss.”

“There is nothing to discuss until I have received my guarantees,” snapped Trevelyan, but stepped aside to let me and Nightingale in.

It was a room like many rooms. A little more stylish than it was entirely natural, maybe, and strangely clean, but there was nothing to suggest that the inhabitant of the house was no ordinary mortal. Heavy green curtains framed the window, through which a grey and restless piece of the sea could be seen. On the windowsill there was a pale begonia.

Actually, no, there was something. It was cold. It was so damn cold that my breath was cloudy in the air, and I was pretty sure this was not supposed to happen in a house that had something even remotely resembling central heating. Not in August, at any rate.

"Got yourself an apprentice, eh?" That voice was like a chill draught, sending goosebumps crawling down my neck. But Nightingale ignored the question; I could not blame him - it irritated me, too. I didn't see what answer could be more obvious than a huge guy in a Met vest who showed no signs of surprise at being presented to somebody who called himself "the god of Cricklade".

“Tell me,” said Nightingale, “are you at all aware of the cost of what you claim ought to be done?”

“It is none of my concern,” answered Trevelyan. “Let the red-tape people worry about making the ends meet. I have a city to take care of.”

“And you are taking care of it by threatening to blow it to smithereens.” A hint of sarcasm crept into Nightingale’s voice. I thought it a little unwise to be so cutting with a man who was essentially a terrorist with a whole town of hostages; but on the other hand, I knew nothing of city spirits. It might be that Nightingale chose the optimal course of action.

“I am threatening to destroy it!” Trevelyan was almost shouting now. He was clearly an excitable man, one of those who are the first to snap when an emergency occurs. “I have done nothing yet. But the coastal erosion is more than real – it has been destroying Cricklade for centuries! For centuries I have tolerated the slow and painful dying of this place!”

“You know as well as I do that it is a natural process,” said Nightingale patiently. “You have to accept it.”

“People do not accept death.” Trevelyan stepped towards Nightingale, a frightful intensity in his expression. “People fight it. If a person is dying, they are given medication, being treated. They are not left to suffer all by themselves.”

For the first time I felt something akin to vestigia – a flash of frankincense, seaweed, sand, and a feeling of sick and cold despair so powerful that it made me reel where I stood.

Nightingale stared at Trevelyan unflinchingly.

“A city is not a person, William,” said he. “You will not suffer, nor die.”

“I am Cricklade. There is no other Cricklade to speak of, and it is I who is going to endure the agony of its death. I know you know that – if anybody does!”

Nightingale dropped his gaze then, his jaw set. But he said nothing. Trevelyan was gloating.

“You are the wrong person for this mission. Because you _do understand_ why I act this way.”

“Don’t,” growled Nightingale, his eyes flickering at me. His opponent opened his mouth in mock astonishment.

“You can’t be saying that-“

“Don’t you dare!” Nightingale looked like he was about to strangle Trevelyan then and there, and I suddenly realized that this was not going the way he had planned. I had to step in.

In hindsight, it was an extraordinarily dumb thing to do. On the other hand, I’m pretty sure that it was also the right one. Because sometimes, extraordinarily dumb choices are the only ones you can make.

“Cricklade does not consist of buildings,” I said loudly, fighting down the increasing urge to vomit caused by the smell of frankincense that assumed a frankly sickening quality to it. “Cricklade is its people. You can never harm them; you would go against your own town.”

I remembered, of course, what Nightingale had told me about genii urbium. _They are not nearly as sensitive to physical changes as the rivers – you can imagine what building demolition would have done to them had it not been so. But they are very sensitive to mental changes – to the mood of their inhabitants, the emergence of new cultural currents. If that makes sense._

It made sense now. Trevelyan cringed under my stare, his face crumpling, his hands clutching at the fabric of his shirt.

“You can’t know what my people want,” he attempted, his voice bordering on a shriek.

“People want to live, Mr. Trevelyan,” responded I. “People always want that. And they have the right to, too, as you so appropriately pointed out. You have to let them decide for themselves; because they are not “yours”, have never been. You are their guardian spirit, not their owner.”

It was intensely embarrassing to be saying all that with any kind of pathos. I don’t know, I certainly cringed a little – it was like yelling at someone in a passionate attempt to convince them that it's bad to slaughter babies with a chainsaw. But apparently what I was saying was a revelation to Trevelyan, because the effect it had on him was evident. He was on the verge of crying for all I could see; and his body trembled wildly.

“You do not understand!” he shouted suddenly, tensing. “You know nothing!”

He was quite out of control the next moment, and something flashed pink, and then yellow, like a pretty firework, exploding with a series of small cracks. It hit the shield I had conjured, too, in a soft and powerful wave. I’d never seen anything of the sort before. It wasn’t coming from any particular object, and it wasn’t connected to Trevelyan, either – at least not to his physical body. It was in the air itself, saturating it, sticking to it, filling the room with a sweet and unnatural glow. And in the midst of it was Trevelyan, his eyes wide in something so close to unbearable grief that it would have horrified me had I been not too busy trying to un-stick myself from his deadly luminescent mycorrhiza.

A moment later I realized that I had not been the first to react, and that I was, in fact, perfectly safe. Nightingale had done something, too – I’m saying “something” because I had only recognized two of the formae he used – and it was keeping the glow away; it was also making me feel very weird, which was why I thought it best to switch my own shield off.

The glow weakened. It was probably due to the fact that Trevelyan was now wrestling with his own begonia. _I suppose that’s Nightingale’s spell_ , thought I with a nightmarish reasonableness. _And botany still is one of the applied sciences._

We were outside the next moment, and Nightingale kind of held me so that I wouldn’t fall. I could only assume that Trevelyan’s mycorrhiza had sucked on me a little, though I didn’t feel hurt or in pain. And there was no worry in Nightingale’s expression; it was fairly obvious, however, that he was distressed by what had happened.

He was telling me something, too, but I needed to make an effort to understand him.

“It was a terribly unprofessional thing to do,” he was saying, “and I do apologize.”

I murmured something in protest, waving my free hand in a gesture of someone utterly and thoroughly drunk.

“What did you use?” was the first thing I asked when I could speak again.

“They used to call it a gas-mask spell. Fourth order.” He was still pale, and his smile was like a convulsion. I wanted to ask what on earth was wrong with him. “ _Impello aer flumen arma_. The warmth is a side effect.”

It was telling that the instance he uttered the words I started idly and quite unconsciously toying with the forma, trying to slap the four parts together in a sort of awkward magical mess. It’s a bad habit, really, and Nightingale had warned me against it numerous times. Originally, verbalizing spells was supposed to help people to remember the right formae, but of course this mnemonic technique had its disadvantages - one of which was the risk to acquire a Pavlovian reflex and end up wrecking epic destruction on everything around.

“Stop that,” snapped Nightingale.

“Sorry,” said I, and looked around with some apprehension. No, it was all quite intact – the houses, the brick fence which I had nearly walked into, the oaks. I didn’t think I could levitate an oak, anyway.

Satisfied by the fact that I appeared to have caused no damage, I returned my attention to Nightingale. He still looked very unhappy, and it worried me. I’m not going to explain why, partially because somewhere in my reference file I’ve already noted him down as Thomas “Please No More Tank Jokes” Nightingale, and partially because I’m not _that_ touchy-feely.

Still, I had no idea how to phrase the question I wanted to ask. So I just stared at him.

“I should tell you something,” said he stiffly.

“I know, sir.”

And I did know. Marvellously, I suddenly knew, though I had not known it a moment before. It was sort of... fascinating. And a little bit weird.


	3. Chapter 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Important fandom problems: I can't make myself write "Nightingale and me" instead of "Nightingale and I". I give up on that.

“That’s why you love plants,” I laughed. It was nice to see Nightingale’s perfectly morose expression change to that of blank astonishment; he was clearly not following. Maybe he expected me to fall to my knees and perform an act of worship now that I realized who he was – if so, he couldn't have been more wrong. I’d have sooner flirted with the statue of Sir Newton. “London is obsessed with flora, sir. Whenever we have an empty space between the buildings, we just slap a random park onto it. The history of the royal dynasty is the history of random park-making. And as to the time of your youth, it could well be dubbed 'The Gardening Epoch'. Ever read Henry Morton?”

“I knew him,” said Nightingale, foggily. But a small smile crept onto his lips.

“But when did you become a-“ _a god_? _A guardian spirit of London_? Shit, it was all damnably off the mark. “-a tutelary deity?”

“After the first War. I was barely grown up, and it all made me very excited. Cities like to take practitioners as their genii, and London offered me the standard agreement right after my parents decided that I’d become an apprentice. My predecessor stepped down and retired to Sussex, and ever since then I have been the only one.”

He pulled his gauntlets off and stuffed his bare hands into his pockets, eyeing me uncomfortably. He had quit smiling at these last words, his face tensing as if he were preparing to watch me run away into the sunset and leave him to deal with Trevelyan all by himself. I swear, had I already mastered that raincloud spell, I would have given him a mini-thunderstorm now.

“Molly knows, I suppose,” he added in a quiet voice, “she’d feel this sort of thing. But I don’t tell it to anyone. You can imagine what kind of problems it would create.”

That look of his was making me positively peeved.

“Well, what do you think I’ll do about it, sir?” I asked vehemently. “Pray to you every evening? ‘O Almighty Inspector Nightingale, Who art in London, hallowed be Thy Name’?”

Nightingale barked a laugh at that.

“No, I don’t suppose you will.”

“That’s right, I won’t. I have never been particularly religious.”

He was just beginning to smile properly when he checked himself and set his face into a frown instead. But it was an insincere frown, and for once, he seemed to be unable to hide his true feeling. He must have realized that, as well, because the next moment he simply turned away from me.

“Let’s just get on with it,” offered I at length. “I’ll tell no one, honour bright. For now, I’d simply like to know where we are going. And if you believe that Trevelyan is really capable of blowing Cricklade up.”

We were walking down a small lane, the August road mud under our feet a dubious shade of sandy yellow. Though I wasn’t dressed in a suit analogue of a little black dress, I couldn’t help but be vaguely rueful about the state of my trousers. Maybe I should have gone with boots, after all.

But Nightingale seemed to be confident in picking his way, and we definitely weren’t headed back to the hotel.

“Yes, yes, I fear he is,” said he. Though he was making a visible effort to change the topic, he appeared almost normal now, and he was looking at me again. “He is... quite, quite capable of it. He is not the Cricklade I used to know. Though it is true that I never thought that this city had made a good choice. And as to your second question, I think we had better visit the local police station. There is one person who could tell us more about the situation – not a practitioner, mind you, but she’s had to deal with magic before.”

The good thing about pieces of fascinating knowledge that is hard to digest is that you can shove them in some remote corner of your brain and forget about them at least temporarily – the stranger the knowledge is, the easier it is to pretend that it doesn’t exist. And so I abandoned all thoughts along the lines of “Jesus Christ on the bike, my governor is literally the capital of Great Britain” and started thinking about Trevelyan and Cricklade instead. Well, no, at first I was thinking about the thermos full of tea with brandy that our wonderful Molly had given me yesterday, and then Nightingale and I halted and organized an impromptu lunch on a piece of what had once been a wall of concrete. I discovered that I was horribly thirsty and wondered briefly if it wasn’t because of Trevelyan’s magic messing around with my brain.

After which my thoughts returned to Cricklade, and a hundred questions I did not know the answers to were occurring to me one after another. Could we try to reason with Trevelyan? Were issues of this kind even supposed to arise? How had the Folly managed them before?

“You said that you doubted if the city had been right in choosing Trevelyan,” said I. “So it is true that not all genii locorum are good at what they do?”

“It is not that they... do something,” replied Nightingale, haltingly. “It’s just their personality. It may or may not be compatible with their status and the power they possess. And William’s the kind of person who should have never become a genius urbi. Sometimes I think that Cricklade’s choice was aesthetical rather than rational. William does have an, how shall I put it, impressive appearance. Rather Byronesque, really. And there is a certain anguished flair about him that suits this place. But he has never been particularly good at pulling himself together.”

“No, he certainly doesn’t seem to be good at _that_.” I giggled despite myself, remembering the fireworks, the mycorrhiza, and the green eyes staring at me that, in retrospect, reminded me of the eyes of a cat hit with a broom.

“Exactly.” Nightingale shot me a grim glance, sweeping the sandwich crumbs from my sleeve. “But what happened today was too much even for him. He was referring to the War when he said,” he winced, “when he said that I _do understand_. And perhaps I should have expected it. But there is nothing normal in a British city spirit bringing those times up; nobody likes to talk about them.”

I could hardly give a meaningful response to that, and I preferred not to employ any of the thousand ways to say “I imagine so” I could come up with. So I didn’t really answer, unless you count resolutely standing up and stuffing half a sandwich into your pocket as an answer.

Nightingale, too, rose, turning his collar up.

“The reason I told you all this to you is really very practical, Peter.” His tone was stern. Though it wasn’t like I was about to object, of course. “You should know as much as possible about this case, and about genii urbium, too. Because there may be unpleasant surprises along the way. I thought I could avoid explaining it in quite such straightforward a fashion, but Trevelyan… Trevelyan made me think better of it. I don’t like what is going on here in Cricklade.”

I mentally pasted some collapsing buildings and a lot of fire over the landscape behind him. Somehow that setting seemed to highlight his intonation far better than the sleepy green sky blossoming with sunrays and the small houses with heavy white curtains.

 

Anyway, we were not that far from the local station now, and soon we had the questionable pleasure of walking through its shabby corridors that stank of coffee and damp stucco. Of course there were no proper lights in half of them, and I was severely tempted to conjure a werelight so as to avoid tripping over mysterious pieces of equipment piled up here and there, but I knew there was too much risk of blowing something up and depriving the poor bastards of the few lamps they did have.

I always say that you shouldn’t believe anybody who tells you that police stations become shabbier the farther you are from the nearest Big Prestigious City (such as London or Edinburgh). Especially don’t believe people who claim that the same can be said of police work. This is a load of bullshit if I’ve ever heard one.

But sometimes police stations in cities like Cricklade just _do_ look pathetic, and there is no denying that. I know this one did, and the impression was not alleviated by the bored indifference with which we were treated. I could understand their feelings very well – I had yet to see a copper who wouldn’t be at least slightly irritated at people randomly interfering with their work – but the memory of Trevelyan made me rather unsympathetic.

Evidently Nightingale felt the same, because twenty minutes and some arguing later we were presented to a Sergeant Erika Maret, a gangly Estonian with lively eyes and a habit of twirling her hair while talking. Every time I had to pronounce her surname I tried to do it the French way – Marétte, sort of – and I’m a little ashamed to say that I soon gave up on that and resorted to calling her “Sergeant”. Nightingale, on the other hand, made a point of mimicking her pronunciation, and from her pleased expression I could only assume he was doing well in that regard. Well, whatever. I had long reconciled myself with the fact that I’d never be that good at languages.

She also tried to give us coffee that I decided not to risk drinking, but overall I thought she was okay. And she spoke in an even, toneless voice that was a welcome change after Trevelyan’s Hamlet-style soliloquies.

They were making small talk now, discussing some odd local specifics I could only partially understand – something about how the demographics of Cricklade had changed since the late eighties. It had nothing to do with magic and was as unexciting as it sounds.

“The situation with William,” said Sergeant Maret finally, when I was already fidgeting and fuming at the sheer amount of formal pleasantries we had exchanged, “has been going on for three weeks now, sir. At first I thought it was just another of his hissy fits, but I soon understood that I was mistaken. He is deadly serious.”

“So I saw,” replied Nightingale. “How did you ascertain that he had meant what he had said? I hope you know that it’s a poor idea for you to try to negotiate with him.”

She pouted a little.

“I know,” she said. “I can’t make multicoloured fireballs with my mind and levitate flowerpots into people’s heads.”

“But _he_ can do that,” Nightingale pointed out. “That and more.”

“Fine, fine. I know. No, I haven’t visited him at all. But it is rather obvious that something is very wrong, isn’t it?”

I frowned.

“Obvious?..”

She raised her gaze at us, surprise showing through her mask of lazy calm.

“Why, haven’t you noticed?”

“Noticed what?”

Nightingale was looking at her very closely, his elbows leant against the desk. There was a fierceness about him, even; I suddenly had a feeling that he knew what it was that we were supposed to be aware of.

“The people. How they talk, how they behave, what they look like.”

We could hardly have seen that, of course, seeing as it had been eight in the morning when we had first walked the streets of Cricklade and as all those people had been luckier than us in that they could keep on sleeping.

“You mean it isn’t just Trevelyan,” I said, slowly.

“No, it isn’t Trevelyan at all. It’s Cricklade. The city is ill, Constable Grant. The spirits are low, the moods are hostile. And William’s demands? This is all people talk about – about how Cricklade, once the capital of a kingdom, was reduced to a village-like borough with a population of three thousand, and how it will inevitably perish if something isn’t done about it.”

“Are you quite sure he hasn’t influenced them?”

She shook her head.

“You should probably ask Inspector Nightingale about the technical aspects of the matter, but I believe it would be impossible. As I understand it, William has no such power. It’s a perfect insanity, Constable – a mass psychosis, if you wish. There are articles about it, too, all sorts of stupid debates in the local press.”

Only now did I notice that she spoke with a soft but distinct accent, and that all her consonants were hopelessly voiceless – _depates, impossiple_. I sipped my coffee stupidly, having quite forgotten that I had decided not to drink it. It tasted strange.

So we were not going against an infuriated local god, we were going against a whole city of people. Tough shit.

“Do you know any names?” We finally asked, in unison. I eyed Nightingale, but said nothing more.

“Maybe somebody who is advocating the cause especially passionately? Somebody who was the first to join the media campaign?” Nightingale continued. I thought that “the media campaign” was a little high-flown for what probably was no more than a squabble between a bunch of gossipy old ladies, but I saw clearly enough what he was driving at. If Trevelyan had not influenced the people of Cricklade, maybe the people of Cricklade had influenced Trevelyan. And, cliché as it was, it meant that there immediately arose the old question of _cui prodest_.

 

When we had come out of the station, the city was awaking from its sleep, the bright daylight flooding the wet streets. The green crowns of the oaks were sprinkled with gold; and the dark windows of the houses started to light up, too, like the eyes of something unsettlingly huge and sentient. There were first people walking down the sandy road in front of us. And, though I was not looking at Nightingale, I knew that he too had been searching their faces, wondering if there truly was something unnatural in every expression or if it was just his imagination.

I liked small cases, I thought. I liked it when my investigations did not actually involve murder, or, if they did, it was just that – a murder, and not somebody trying to burn the Parliament and conquer the North America. I’d have taken that flying notebook case over Cricklade in a heartbeat.

And I thought Nightingale would have, too. There are only so many big dramatic events you can survive before you become tired.


	4. Chapter 4

I think it says something about your life when you have a vague sense of déjà vu upon walking into a flat and seeing its owner’s body pinned to the ceiling with a sword.

I’m not sure what this something is. Maybe it is a _wow, look at your shitty choices_.

“Richard Williams, sir?” I asked automatically, drawing forward a little. Nightingale grabbed my arm rather unceremoniously, preventing me from stepping onto the dusty orange Persian rug that lay directly under the corpse. The dull copper handle of the sword winked at me, vaguely ominous in its apparent harmlessness.

It was a nasty business, almost as unpleasant to look at as your average RTC pedestrian. The unfortunate bloke’s chest had been cut right through, and the blade had then been driven into the ceiling with tremendous force. There was no more than ten inches of it sticking out on our side; I was pretty sure that we would discover another ten inches protruding from the floor of the room above when we started searching the house. He was transfixed there like a huge bug, and his body was all sagged. I wasn’t exactly unaccustomed to such things and I had long ceased to be squeamish about it, but I didn’t feel like staring.

“Yes, I do rather think this is our journalist,” said Nightingale. He was inspecting the body keenly, though he had not made any attempt to move towards it from where he stood.

Certainly the way the victim had been killed was very curious. His attacker must have had to lift him with one arm, take the sword in the hand of the other, throw him against the ceiling (a good two feet upwards), and drive the weapon home. I had to admit that my assumptions about the nature of the conflict between the late Mr. Richard Williams and the administration of Cricklade appeared to be way off the mark. If it was a gossipy old lady who had done it, it must have been a very big and furious one. Possibly non-human, too.

There were no vestigia, though, not even the kind of feeble, lingering residual magic I had sensed in Trevelyan’s yard. Not a whiff of anything, nor a sound, nor a sensation. Williams’ flat was magically sterile, clean like a morgue.

“Be so kind as to step aside, Peter,” Nightingale continued, casually. I hastened to make a couple of steps back. This measure was obviously not going to protect me from whatever it was that he was about to do, but I knew it would make the thing more bearable – amazing how much difference a few feet can make, really.

“What is it?” I asked. “A booby trap?”

Nightingale raised his silver-top and carefully moved the rug. Now I saw the dried blood – it was coming off in flakes, so black as to be nearly indistinguishable from regular dust; apparently Williams had been dead for quite a while. But there was nothing else on the floor.

“No,” concluded Nightingale. “Probably not.”

But he did not look relaxed – and of course there was no reason to be. If it wasn’t a booby trap, then it must have been something else, some invisible crap that could explode and bury us under the ruins of the house. Neither I nor Nightingale cherished the prospect, grateful though the relatives of the late R. Williams might be for being thus spared the need to organize a funeral.

Thankfully, the room had virtually no furniture, and there was only one unusual object in it that could serve as an analogue of a dog battery.

“It is going to be bad,” warned Nightingale. That was the only indication he gave that this time, there might have been no dogs involved; I had suspected as much, and I braced myself. I felt him shaping the forma in his mind – hardly different from what I had known it to be. At this point I was pretty good at recognizing its finer nuances, and I could – or so I imagined – concentrate on it instead of concentrating on the heart-wrenching gush of the discharged magic.

But no amount of mental discipline could prepare me for this, for this flash of mortal sickness, for the endless shouting that no longer sounded like a noise coming from the throat of a living creature, for the dull clank of metal against bone. When Nightingale touched the handle of the sword with his bare fingers, it was as if he switched the lights on – a lamp that emitted pain and fear. I came to my senses only to discover that all the edges were surreally sharp and that the air burnt my skin like nettles; but I did my best to stand upright and to look as normal as I could.

Even Nightingale seemed to blanch. I knew he must have been remembering all sorts of things. He briefly lay a hand on my shoulder, and I pretended not to notice it - I couldn't tell if he did it involuntarily or on purpose.

And then I caught it amidst the nightmare that was the death of Williams, the lingering traces of an _impello_. Far from Trevelyan’s non-Newtonian magic, it was a perfectly normal spell (as oxymoronic as it sounds), a strong, well shaped forma, nothing like my clumsy attempts at levitating apples. And it was familiar. But I couldn’t quite recognize it – it was a memory without a context, a name without a face.

It was a name without a face.

Nightingale too had sensed it, but I saw that he was unsure of his conclusions. He had never had an opportunity to familiarize himself with this _signare_ ; it was I who knew it well. And he must have been very reluctant to believe his own senses now. I know I would have been. Hell, I knew some fairytales that sounded more plausible than that we had _once again_ ran into this ethically challenged prick.

But unfortunately, I had no doubt about that _impello_.

“Sir,” I said. “Sir, it is him.”

I thought I saw him grit his teeth.

“Call the locals.”

Mentally I congratulated myself on having taken the batteries out of the Airwave before going into the house. I had not expected anything quite as dramatic as a sword charged with magic, but it had long become a habit to switch all the tech off before entering a potentially _Falcon_ building. I had sometimes debated with myself the wisdom of doing so; it put me at a disadvantage in that I wouldn’t be able to call for help or report the situation quickly enough should the necessity arise. But now it came in handy, because had I not done that, I would not have been able to report the situation at all.

I was murmuring answers to the standard questions, and then to other questions that were only to be expected – _IC3 male, yes, yes, no, really pinned to the ceiling, looks like a sword to me_ – but I was doing that without thinking. What I was contemplating in that very moment, and what I’m sure Nightingale was contemplating, was the fact that there had been only one _signare_ in that multitude of spells. To be sure, I was inexperienced and could not recognize the other formae, especially since I had been a little busy trying to survive a second-hand mortal agony, but I would have definitely noticed if there had been, well, if there had been something else there.

There had been nothing. I wasn’t sure what to make of it, and I didn’t want to hope.

“I wonder,” said Nightingale’s voice from behind me, “why could he possibly want Cricklade to be rebuilt?”

He sounded a little subdued. I couldn’t help but marvel at how he managed to phrase it without using a single swearword. All I could think in regard to Trevelyan, R. Williams, the sword, and the signare was “what the literal fuck”.

We had to wait for the locals to arrive. They had promised to take Sergeant Maret along – apparently the word was already out about the specifics of our work.

I found it hard to concentrate on the amount of time that had passed since Nightingale had discharged the trap, and indeed on anything at all. It did not help that I kept being distracted by the howls of the wind that beat against the window frame, causing it to rattle and creak.

Now I was wondering how I had not noticed it before. I mean, it wasn’t exactly easy to miss – there was a storm raging outside. Already the big fir that stood close to the shoreline was swaying dangerously, and the breakers were so high as to be washing over the pier; the rain was torrential, the kind that makes you soaking wet regardless of how many umbrellas you carry.

I stared at it stupidly. Here and there I could see brief, bright flashes of lightning, outlining the oaks and the house roofs.

Even though I wasn’t exactly in the mood for thinking about the shenanigans of the local weather, I distinctly remember feeling surprised at how quickly it had changed. Though it was true that I had thought it likely for this day to be windy, there was something decidedly unnatural in the way the moderate summer breeze Nightingale and I had enjoyed that morning had turned into something increasingly resembling a hurricane.

I turned around and looked at Nightingale. He was standing almost directly under the body, paying no mind to the fact that there were mere inches between the back of his head and the face of the unfortunate Williams. He looked a little like a sinister kind of guardian angel; and he was staring at me, his gaze unmoving.

“What if he doesn’t want Cricklade to be rebuilt at all?” I said, and I thought I detected a slight change in his posture, almost as if he’d flinched. His eyes were gleaming. “What if he wants it to be _destroyed_?”

“Why ever would he want that?”

“Look, sir. He wants magic. A whole bloody lot of magic.”

“Indeed,” said Nightingale, and walked forward, craning his neck to take in the picture of the storm-torn landscape outside. I could hear the unceasing din and patter of water even through a double-glazed window.

“And now that he failed to get it from the London Stadtkrone it seems only logical to assume that he’d try to seek it elsewhere. Natural sources of magic, maybe.”

“Such as genii locorum.”

“Such as genii locorum.”

Nightingale turned to me and stopped, strangely close; his expression was unreadable. He had always been great at this – at being unreadable, I mean. If he were an actor, the one impersonation he would have always been able to pull off would have been that of a rock.

 

Our meaningful staring at each other was, unfortunately, interrupted by the knocking on the door that signified the arrival of our Cricklade colleagues. There was one DI, a black-haired guy with a pointy nose, his young chubby-faced DC, and Sergeant Erika Maret. All three were wet to the bone in spite of wearing shapeless tent-like weatherproofs. They were clearly aching for some tea and a bunch of dry warm towels, but the wish to appear professional completely overrode any inclination they had to indicate as much. An exchange of greetings followed; the trio proceeded to enter the room and spend some minutes contemplating the wretched corpse. I couldn’t blame them – it isn’t every day that you see someone die in this fashion, regardless of how seasoned a copper you are. Had I not been Nightingale’s apprentice, I too would have been making futile attempts to reconcile Mr. Williams’ demise with what I knew of the basic laws of gravity and common sense.

Still, I had to hand it to them: they swallowed their astonishment and set about searching the house and lifting fingerprints from any and every smooth surface they could find. I seriously doubted they were going to discover any that belonged to somebody other than Williams (and maybe Williams’ girlfriend), but they were doing something, at least. I wasn’t sure the same could be said of Nightingale and me.

We _were_ investigating, of course, and we had made considerable progress in understanding the situation, but to change it seemed an impossible quest. The series of incidents that had led us to Cricklade and then to where we were now were a bloody disaster, the beginning of a path leading to a fuck-up the size of California. And new developments were occurring at an incredible rate, branching in all directions and leaving us helpless to prevent the fuck-up in question.

Really, there wasn’t much that we could do. If I had guessed correctly, the storm meant that Trevelyan was an emotional wreck, and I knew he’d snap – sooner or later, he’d snap and destroy his city with all its inhabitants and architecture and greenery. Had Richard Williams not been dead, we would have had an opportunity to calm the people down and thus allow the crisis to pass; but now everything was bound to go downhill, because – I realized it now – Williams’ death would inevitably be considered as having to do with his journalistic activities and his stance on the matter of rebuilding Cricklade. There would be a public uproar, and then the city would come tumbling down.

The bastard had planned everything, and Nightingale and I could only watch this fiery trainwreck of a case unfold.

I glanced at Nightingale. He looked grim, but he was examining the bookshelves with extraordinary determination, as though he really thought that it did matter what our findings would be. I felt comforted. Maybe it did matter, after all. There had been all sorts of unexpected developments – the next one could provide us with a new chance to set things right.

I tried to ignore the wild howling of the wind and the rumbling of the thunder outside and applied myself to the task of looking through Williams’ personal belongings, of which there were few. A straight razor – a pocket edition of Shakespeare – a pornographic magazine – clearly the guy knew what the bare essentials were. Nothing suspicious had caught my eye so far.

“Do you think he was a Little Crocodile, sir?” I asked.

“Almost sure of it,” responded Nightingale, who was hurriedly leafing through Williams’ books. “Though it probably doesn’t matter all that much. This was not the reason he was killed.”

“No,” I said. “No, it wasn’t.”

I must have sounded down (no wonder, seeing as I thought that Cricklade was as good as destroyed), because he returned the volume he held in its place on the shelf and made a gesture I could almost describe as soothing.

“We’re not surrendering, Peter,” he said. “We will save these people and this place.”

“I don’t imagine you can confront Trevelyan on his territory,” I murmured. I hoped to God it hadn’t come out as cutting or too whiny. “We should call Stephanopoulos.”

“No, I can’t confront him,” Nightingale said, pointedly ignoring the second part of my statement. He took Williams’ pocket edition of Shakespeare and was gripping it in his gloved hands as if it were a Bible on which he was preparing to swear. “Not as long as he is the god of Cricklade. Trevelyan will have to step down."

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> *I should probably explain what RTC is: Road Traffic Collision.


	5. Chapter 5

“The way your predecessor did,” I said, a tad incredulously. When I envisaged it, I imagined it being an honourable abdication, an act of goodwill on the part of the spirit of London – whoever had borne this title before Nightingale. And I did not think the current god of Cricklade would be willing to retire. In fact, I already began to doubt if he was at all capable of compromise; it seemed as though he had gone utterly of his trolley.

But Nightingale’s expression was that of resolve.

“It shall not be the easiest thing to do. We’ll have to force him to obey us, to go through the procedure. But we are at an advantage here. Because London has ritual power over any other city of this country – and I _am_ London.”

“Sounds pretty 1900s to me,” I said, and he grinned a little.

“That’s because it is.”

Oh. Right. Somehow I had totally forgotten that Nightingale hadn’t actually been born in the eighties.

Now that I was looking him in the eye I saw that whatever doubts he might have had about the optimal course of action were no longer there; he knew what was to be done and how he wanted it to be done. That singularity of purpose could have forced the Queen herself to wonder if she hadn’t been in power for far too long.

“Got it, sir,” I sighed. “What exactly are we going to do?”

“The first step is simple enough,” shrugged he. “We need to find a person who’d be willing to succeed Trevelyan.”

It sounded about as simple as to find a four-leaf clover on Mars, which was why I instantly suspected that he already had somebody in mind. Unfortunately, I couldn’t ask him about it, because the next moment I had someone bump into my back, and I whirled around only to see Sergeant Maret standing there with a pile of books in her arms.

“Sorry, Constable,” she said, quite unruffled by my glare, and turned to Nightingale. “These are from the second floor, if I may, sir. You told us to tell you if we found anything like this.”

Nightingale snatched the upper volume from the pile, and I took the one under it. I inspected mine – Newton’s opus magnum, of course, 1895, barbarically stripped of cover and covered in notes made in ball pen.

“I’ve always thought that people who can treat old books like this are secretly evil,” I commented. “Wait- sir?”

Apparently they both had walked away when I hadn’t been looking, and I had to scan the room twice before I spotted them in the far corner, behind one of Williams’ shelves. One of Nightingale’s arms was linked through Maret’s, and he loomed over her, every inch the authority, explaining something calmly and at length.

I gawked a little. Choosing Maret made some sort of sense, of course – she, as Nightingale had put it, had “had to deal with magic before” – but, but- she was so unlike Trevelyan! There was nothing impressive about her, nothing poetic, nothing that would suit this pompous city. Chelmsford would have had somebody like her; Cricklade, however, was a different kettle of fish. If I had understood anything about its preferences when I had met with Trevelyan, it was that Cricklade tended to behave like a teenager obsessing over handsome assholes. And Maret seemed to be neither.

But it was also true that we had little time and even less choice. I did not fancy that the pointy-nosed bloke would have reacted favourably to the idea of becoming a god, of all things; the first association normal people had with the concept of genii locorum was Greek mythology, and nobody in their right mind would want to turn into a bad-tempered deity whose idea of a good pastime was copulating with swans.

So I proceeded with inspecting the books Maret had left on the windowsill, eyeing Nightingale and Maret discreetly. At first she seemed to be asking questions; gradually her eyes grew rounder and rounder – it was nice to see someone greener than me, and I grinned to myself – and finally she resorted to blinking at him, evidently speechless. He said something else, made a noncommittal gesture at her last question, turned, and strode back to my side.

“I gave her five minutes to think.”

Well, that had been a pretty damn quick development.

“And if she says no?”

Nightingale shrugged.

“I’ll think of something.”

Somehow I didn’t doubt he would. I saw a number of solutions, too, though I liked none of them – we could have _me_ take over Trevelyan’s position, for example. I could not imagine what it would be like to spend the rest of my days as the god of Cricklade, away from London, away from the Folly. And, presumably, no longer an apprentice of Nightingale’s.

“I wanted to ask, why her? I understand she is the only person who wouldn’t go into a brain shutdown at the idea, but she seems to be the opposite of what Cricklade wants.”

“She may very well be that, but she is exactly what Cricklade _needs_. A quick-witted, efficient officer, good at what she does, and with no imagination at all - if there were an award for remarkable lack of curiosity, she’d be the most obvious nominee. We were quite overjoyed to find her when we were first establishing contact with the locals.”

He shot me a little glance.

“And she’s a loner, too. It’s a good thing to be if you’re contemplating becoming a genius loci. People tend to react badly to the discovery that one of those close to them is actually a god.”

The implications would have made me wince had I not been so preoccupied with my calculations as to our plans. I was certain I'd remember this conversation afterwards; a surefire sign that we were talking about something we shouldn't have been talking about.

“Right, okay,” I said hurriedly. “Five minutes over yet?”

“Six, to be precise,” replied he, consulting his watch. “There, let’s ask her. Sergeant!”

Maret appeared from behind him as though she were waiting to be called (she probably was, I realized with some dismay, and she must’ve heard Nightingale’s last remark). Her expression was still somewhat gobsmacked, but her cheeks were flushed with excitement; I saw her glowing eyes and thought it was a “yes”.

So it was, of course.

“Are you quite, quite sure?” Nightingale asked quietly. “A half-hearted agreement is the last thing we need. You must be perfectly willing.”

“I am, sir,” said Maret to that. “It’ll be an honour.”

More of a pain in the ass than an honour, thought I, but kept my mouth shut. The girl had accomplished something of a feat, after all – she had made what essentially was the decision of her life in a five minutes’ time. It made the probability of this decision being the most idiotic mistake she’d ever make unreasonably high, but it also made the probability of my becoming the god of Cricklade non-existent, so I certainly wasn’t about to complain.

And it was a situation of emergency, after all.

“Very well, then,” said Nightingale. “Off we go.”

And soon we were outside, right in the pretty mess Trevelyan had made of his city. Unfortunately, I quite fail to describe what was going on – except that the rain was horizontal, rather as if we were in a plane and flying through a raincloud. The streets were perfectly empty, of course, and I can only imagine the inhabitants of Cricklade thought that we were all three out of our minds.

If they were really watching us, they must have been even more surprised when Nightingale raised his hand and waved it about a little to the effect of creating a bubble of space where there was no rain at all (though the wind, unfortunately, still persisted in trying to blow my head off my shoulders). It was like an invisible umbrella, very pretty, with the water bouncing off its edges in dozens of miniature rainbows. As far as I could tell, it was a variation of the _impello aer flumen_ forma Nightingale had used to prevent Trevelyan from harming me – a handy thing, that. I made a mental note to ask Nightingale about it when the Cricklade affair was over.

“Do we have a plan, sir?” I asked, raising my voice. He eyed me. His dark hair bristled in the wind, giving his appearance a decidedly wild air.

“We’ll knock him out,” he said.

“Good plan.”

“Have anything better to offer?” I had an unsettling feeling that he had just stopped himself from addressing me by my rank. I’d come to know that Nightingale in his action mode was as difficult as he was efficient; it was no use arguing when I had no ready solution.

The streets we were crossing, though obscured by the rain, seemed vaguely familiar. Soon I spotted the ruins of the concrete wall – it was only a hundred feet to Trevelyan’s house. A good copper as I was, I hurriedly shaped a combination of _impello_ and _aer_ I could use should Maret or I be in danger: a futile precaution, maybe, but it made me calm down a little.

At last, Nightingale halted our party with a wave of his hand. His gesture had switched the magical umbrella-thingy off, too, and we both received a bucketful of water right in the face.

“You stand back,” said Nightingale to Maret. “And you, Peter, come with me.”

Maret would’ve answered something (all things considered, it must have been a bit humiliating to have a mere constable go ahead of her into action), only she had yet to get last of the water out of her nasopharynx.

“No objections accepted, Sergeant,” snapped he. “You’ll remain here.”

I stepped forward. Nightingale turned to me rapidly.

“Don’t do anything until I tell you to,” he said. “Stay out of the line of fire. The instance I call you, come inside and follow my instructions. Sergeant, when you see Constable Grant enter the house, follow him. Is this understood? Does anyone have any questions?”

“No, sir,” said Maret.

“No,” said I. “But it doesn’t look as if-“

I don’t rightly remember what it was that I wanted to say then, but I never got to finish the sentence. Nightingale grabbed my hand and sprinted down the street. It was a curious sensation, with the relentless wind blowing in our backs – running seemed to require no effort at all.

“Get out of the way,” he ordered curtly, pushing me aside some ten feet away from the gate.

And then there was a horrible crash. I conjured a shield just in time to prevent a huge piece of wood from pinning me to the pavement – it was a part of what had been Trevelyan’s fence a moment ago. I turned a little to throw a glance at Maret; she stood where we had left her, gaping at the scene.

Meanwhile Nightingale continued what he had started. Another spell blew the front wall up; I saw the interior of the house, exposed to the storm that came gushing in, immediately throwing Trevelyan’s precious flowerpots down and raising a flurry of papers from the desk. So far I could see no sign of Trevelyan himself, which worried me a little. But Nightingale kept striking, relentlessly, remorselessly, destroying every partition and every piece of furniture he could see – there went a drawer, exploding in a million little pieces of something suspiciously resembling ice.

And finally I saw a pink and yellow wave rise and fall from behind that chaos, as though the ribcage of a gigantic animal rising and falling in one enormous breath.

“William!” bellowed Nightingale. “Cease – resistance – and – we – won’t – harm – you!”

Maybe Trevelyan was too aggravated at the loss of his drawer to care, or maybe he was beyond understanding Nightingale’s words. The one thing I can say with certainty is that the violence of his reaction indicated no desire to surrender. Because the next moment, something went off with an enormous _boom_ , and there was not only no front wall and no gate, but no house at all.

Too bad now I couldn’t obey Nightingale’s order to come inside the instance he told me to. There was quite literally no “inside”.

He peered into the cloud of thick white dust that hung in the air. No further action on Trevelyan’s part followed; but, strangely, the storm had subsided a little, and the wind moderated so much that I could breathe without being afraid to drown. The dust was whirling and curling, rapidly losing its shape under the incessant current of the rain. We both knew Trevelyan was in there – and unharmed, too, if the force of his last blow was anything to judge by.

“William,” Nightingale prompted loudly. “Come on. You know it is not your fault.”

I thought I had heard something akin to a sob, and then came a curious little sound, much like the crunch of a breaking biscuit. Something golden crept slowly out of the dust; I recognized it immediately as a part of the mycorrhiza. It looked almost harmless now, a glowing fragile thing, moving gracefully through the air.

Then it came upon Nightingale in one smooth predatory movement. It would’ve seized him by the throat if not for his parrying the blow with his cane; the thing recoiled at once, and he stepped forward, throwing his hand up.

The cloud of dust came apart. There, his lanky body limp and his arms spread wide, lay Trevelyan. And it was deafeningly quiet, too, for the rain had stopped.

I stood frozen for a moment. Nightingale wiped the water and the dust off his face, brushing his soaked fringe aside. Then he walked towards Trevelyan, looked down at him, and turned to me.

“Peter,” he called. His voice sounded unnaturally loud in that silence. I heard Maret’s light steps behind me; I could tell even without turning that she was running down the street.

I walked some ten feet forward, to where the fence had stood not half an hour ago. Nightingale was looking at me.

“Is he-?” I asked.

“No,” replied he, “I have merely knocked him out as I said. He’s suffered no injury. Quick, get Sergeant Maret over here. Trevelyan won’t be unconscious for long.”

This instruction proved to be quite unnecessary: Maret was approaching us already, her long wet plaits slapping against her shoulders.

“I took the liberty of approaching you, sir,” she began apologetically.

“-quite right,” interrupted Nightingale. “Come closer. Do you by any chance have a lipstick with you?”

Maret blinked.

“Why yes, sir. Do you need it?”

I thought I could see where this was going. Magical rituals may seem ridiculous to an exterior observer, but there is good reason for creating all these elaborate procedures involving pentagrams, black honey, and the blood of a hare killed at midnight. If not for that, there would be too much risk of doing magic on accident, with potentially disastrous and irreversible consequences. To put it simply, rituals need to be complicated so that nobody can accidentally summon Satan while reading a morning newspaper. But of course some degree of simplification is always possible – thus, if you are told to draw a pentagram with blood, sometimes you can say “fuck it” and use watercolours instead.

“Yes, please,” said Nightingale. “Give it to Constable Grant. Peter, I’d ask you to draw a Seal of Solomon.”

Close enough, I mused.

“Is there any place in particular where I need to draw it?” I asked, accepting the lipstick from Maret.

“Preferably around Trevelyan. He’ll return to his senses in a moment, by the way – you’d better be on guard.”

I nodded and set about drawing a hexagram around the poor devil. He gave no sign of regaining consciousness, but I knew better than to trust this impression – I still remembered the apparent harmlessness of the golden tentacle that had tried to strangle Nightingale.

The lipstick was soft, and it kept breaking when I dragged it against the dust-covered stone (I sincerely hoped it wasn’t too expensive, because there was no chance in hell it could ever be used again), but finally I managed to make something not _entirely_ unlike a Seal. Though it was pretty wobbly, I grant you.

“It’ll have to do,” sighed Nightingale, giving my creation a doubtful look. “Stand on my left, Sergeant. You’ll be a witness, Peter. Now-“

He squatted down, slapping Trevelyan lightly on the right cheek and then on the left.

“Come on,” he murmured. As if awoken by this prompting, Trevelyan raised his head a little way; his big green eyes blinked, focussing on Nightingale’s face.

“No,” he said, weakly. Then, louder, “no!”

A change had come over his expression; I could see that with every second he grew more and more fearful. He was attempting to crawl away from us, shrinking under Nightingale’s gaze. But Nightingale held his shoulders in a steely grip.

“In the name of the capital of our Empire,” he was saying, stiffly, making no attempt to make himself sound appropriately lofty, “as represented by the needs and desires of our people, I command you-“

“Oh, God,” said Trevelyan. “Don’t, Thomas, I beg of you, don’t!”

“I command you,” Nightingale continued, his voice rising, “to give up the title of the guardian spirit of the town of Cricklade.”

“God!”

“Just as I, London, have given you this title, I can decide when to take it back. In accordance with the agreement, I have chosen you a successor.”

Nightingale signalled for Maret to come closer.

“Erika Maret, originally of Narva, is to succeed you in guarding this city’s wellbeing. With the authority I, as London, possess, I declare her the goddess of Cricklade and grant her all the privileges associated with the title.”

“Sergeant, repeat after me. I, Erika Maret, accept the title of the goddess of Cricklade and assume all the obligations associated with it.”

The edges of the hexagram glowed with feeble red light, and I could feel the lipstick under my fingers grow warm. I rose to my feet, feeling my legs ache from sitting on the ground.

“I, Erika Maret,” Maret repeated quietly, “accept the title of the goddess of Cricklade and assume all the obligations associated with it.”

Trevelyan lay on the ground, curled in a ball. He was sobbing aloud. I had an odd feeling of queasiness, as if I were witnessing an amputation of a limb with no anaesthesia.

“Constable Peter Grant is to bear witness,” Nightingale continued, “that the ritual was conducted in accordance with the rules of the agreement. Peter, repeat: ‘I, Peter Grant, confirm that the ritual of transferring the title of the guardian spirit of the town of Cricklade was conducted in accordance with the rules of the agreement.’”

I repeated that. My words had torn the last heart-wrenching sob from Trevelyan, and he fell suddenly and oddly quiet. The glow of the hexagram was lining his body with warm red stripes. And I noticed that the sky above our heads was clearing, the transparent evening revealing the first stars and the crescent of the moon.


	6. Chapter 6

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> suddenly a huge chapter.

It felt final. It was a natural ending, sort of like “and they lived happily ever after”. Nothing of importance could possibly happen now; indeed, I doubted if anything would happen at all. When I looked at the horizon, I almost expected the closing credits to appear against the last remains of sunlight. _Starring Thomas Nightingale as the guardian spirit of London and Peter Grant as himself_.

The strip of light blue changed to black. No credits seemed to be appearing, and I was getting a little cold in my soaking wet T-shirt.

I looked a question at Nightingale.

“We’ll have to get Trevelyan out of here,” he said, thoughtfully. “And taking him to A&E won’t do. Not only is his... condition non-critical, but they’ll have no idea how to help him. Sergeant?”

“Yes, sir?”

“Can you take care of him?” He rummaged through the pockets of his jacket, producing the car keys. Then he checked himself and turned to Maret, scanning her from head to toe; his eyes were slightly narrowed. "Oh, and by the way, how do you feel?”

She didn’t look like she was very sure of the answer. Unlike me and Nightingale, she was not covered in dirt and concrete dust, but apparently something about how her body felt was making her uncomfortable – she kept stealing glances at it, as if making sure that she still had the right number of arms and legs.

“I don’t know,” there was wonder in her voice. “It feels like... I’m not alone in my head. But they are not the inhabitants of the city, sir. I’m not sure they are even human.”

"I think you’ll find that out soon enough,” responded he, and offered a dry grin. “What about our friend Williams and his harebrained schemes?”

That was, I realized, the pressing question of the moment: whether Maret would still be on our side when she ceased to view the situation with coastal erosion as a sociological problem and began to view it as an emotional one. Neither her posture nor her expression indicated that she was about to subject three thousand people to painful death, but I detected slight tension in Nightingale’s body language – and in hindsight, that grin had been a little mirthless, too. Well, fuck.

Maret must’ve noticed our discomfort, because she widened her eyes and waved her hands at us.

“Oh! Oh, I’m sorry, I didn’t realize you’d be worried about that! No, no, I don’t feel it at all. I was a little afraid it would be like that – an uncontrollable urge to do something, you know? But I can assure you I experience absolutely no need to commit mass murder.”

Nightingale’s shoulders slackened a little. I shot a feeble smile at Maret, which I hoped was reassuring, or at least as reassuring as the “I’m glad we won’t have to fight you with magic” sort of smile could be.

“And I think I can drive,” she added, extending her hand for the keys. “You sure he wouldn’t be better off hospitalised?”

“No.” He glanced at the shoreline, and then at the street we had left behind when entering the grounds of Trevelyan’s house. “There’s nothing to do but let him sleep... a lot. And I trust you’ll look after him, Sergeant, until we return.” Now he was looking her in the eye. “If neither of us do, you’re free to do whatever you please.”

Something stirred in Maret’s face. For a moment she was visibly struggling with words; but I saw that she couldn’t find the right ones.

“Yes, sir,” she blurted out with a perfectly helpless air. “Anything else you’d advise me to do about the Cricklade thing?”

Nightingale thought for a moment.

“The Williams murder is going to have consequences, regardless of what you do. You might as well soften the blow. See if you can persuade the Cricklade press to take your side – make them see reason. It is, after all, perfectly illogical to assume that the administration did any harm to Williams, and the project itself is beyond ridiculous. But be careful; I cannot guarantee that you won’t encounter people who have a cause of their own.”

She nodded eagerly, drops of water from her hair flying in all directions. The look on her face when Nightingale addressed her suggested that there must have been a bit of hero worship going on; curiosity or no curiosity, the way he had basically made half a building into fine powder seemed to have had a deepest impression on her. I admit to experiencing a momentary urge to tell her about the tanks, just to see her ask him for an autograph – unfortunately, I doubted Nightingale would appreciate my acting as his PR.

“I’ll be right back, sir,” she said. “As quickly as I can.”

With that, she turned and darted away. I knew we had about fifteen minutes until her return; and, tempted though I was to stand still and stare into the darkness (what with me being cold, hungry, and tired all at bloody once), there was Trevelyan to be taken care of. Unlike us, he was perfectly dry – the bastard – but he wore nothing save for a flimsy silk shirt, and the air was well below seventy degrees.

I turned around only to discover that Nightingale had already thought of all that. He was kneeling beside Trevelyan, and he was clearly about to take his jacket off.

“Sir,” protested I. “Can’t you just, I don’t know, use a warming spell? I refuse to believe nobody has ever thought of that.”

“Don’t be ridiculous, Peter,” said Nightingale, “of course somebody has. But I wouldn’t like to use any magic if I can help it. It will do him no good.”

“Dr. Walid is going to slaughter me with a meat-axe if you get sick.”

“Nobody said I can’t use magic on _us_ ,” shrugged he, looking up at me. He raised one of his hands and then gently curled and uncurled his fingers. It was a dancing, live warmth, spreading all over my skin and sending tingles down my spine; I was still wet as a drowned rat, but I discovered that there was (unsurprisingly) an enormous difference between being wet while freezing your balls off and being wet while wrapped in a magical analogue of a woollen blanket. Especially since the latter turned out to be an absolutely heavenly sensation.

“Wow,” I could only say. “Thanks.”

Nightingale smiled.

“There were attempts to modify it so as to include a drying spell, but all the variations have the unfortunate side effect of burning your hair off.”

“I think I’d rather be wet.”

“Yes, I thought so too.”

He did do something to the jacket, however – presumably the forma he had mentioned was safe as long as it was used on inanimate objects. Trevelyan was perfectly limp when we were wrapping the jacket around his shoulders; his face bore a look of relaxed peacefulness. Nightingale put Trevelyan’s head on his lap so as to avoid leaving him to lie on the naked concrete.

My brain was working rapidly now that I didn’t have to spare any attention to inventing elaborately obscene epithets to describe how shitty I felt, and the one thing I remembered was the wording Nightingale had used when giving instructions to Maret. “If neither of us return”- that was something more than a regular precaution. He had always been very particular about such possibilities, of course (no wonder, seeing as our job description included dealing with predatory vaginas and spontaneous human combustion), but the way he had said it was far from the matter-of-fact tone he’d have normally employed.

“I gather I can start thinking about the terms of my will,” I said. Nightingale’s lips tensed a little – I couldn’t say if he was still smiling or whether he considered my tone too light.

“You mean you haven’t thought of that yet,” said he.

“Joking, sir. I do in fact have a will.”

“As well you should,” he answered philosophically. “If only out of principle.”

I experienced a surge of morbid interest as to what Nightingale’s own possessions were and who would come into them in case of his death. Trust me to think the most inappropriate thought when it matters.

My own arrangements were predictable. I had left most of my money (not a lot) and other property to my parents; Lesley used to be the only person who, while not being my relative, stood to benefit in case of my death, but after Skygarden I had taken her name off the documents. For some reason having no one but my parents to leave my stuff to had felt intensely uncomfortable, and I remember trying to think of other people I could mention. Zach, maybe? But I couldn’t for the life of me think of something Zach would actually find useful. And I was of the opinion that giving him money would only provoke him to organize a commemoration party with lots of weed.

When the next person on the list had turned out to be Stephanopoulos, I realized that I was a sad and lonely little nerd.

And then there was Nightingale. Nightingale was the obvious candidate. But he was, like, _Nightingale_ , with classy leather gloves and a silver-top and suits that cost more than my liver would have cost on the organ black market. Still, I would have left something to him, but I had absolutely failed to come up with an original idea. It had briefly made me envious of all those people who seemed to have lots of unnaturally symbolic and memorable objects in their possession – of Albus Dumbledore with his stupid Snitch, especially.

I blinked a little. Nightingale was eyeing me with a look of troubled curiosity, almost as if he could hear that last thought.

“What the devil are you thinking about, Peter?” asked he, sounding a bit worried. “Your face is- I have no idea what this expression is even supposed to mean.”

“Nothing, sir,” I said.

_Nothing, I’m just pathetically overinvested in the idea of making my governor remember me after my hypothetical death._

“All right.” He paused. “Though you were being unusually inattentive.”

He was right. To be fair, Sergeant Maret was apparently an expert driver and the Jag had a deliciously smooth acceleration, but it hardly justified my taking no note of its bumper that was close to touching my ankles.

She turned the headlights on and jumped out. I walked over to help her to get Trevelyan into the backseat, and she nodded gratefully, taking him under the arms. The man was almost impossibly tall – it was a wonder we managed to squeeze him into the car without folding him twice.

“You take care of him, Sarge,” I said. “I got an impression that the ritual was pretty hard on him.”

“Sure,” said she. “You take care of yourself. What the heck was your governor talking about?”

“I wish I knew.”

I was being half-honest; in truth, a part of me already suspected what Nightingale had had in mind.

“Well,” she continued, with a certain feeling. “Well. Good luck, then.”

I shook hands with her.

“Thanks. And do try not to do anything to the Jag. He’ll be furious if it gets scratched.”

Maret pulled a sour face, wringing one of her plaits out; I thought, in connection to nothing in particular, that her hair must be beautiful when dried and let loose.

“Bye, Constable,” said she, and turned away from me, climbing into the driver seat. The car sighed gently at the turn of the key, and in a minute they were gone, leaving us alone among the ruins.

But at least we were no longer burdened with Trevelyan; that was a big relief.

“He’s homeless now,” I remarked, making my way back to Nightingale. “I fancy he isn’t going to be overjoyed with his life upon waking up.”

“Trevelyan’s wellbeing is the least of our current problems.”

“What is our problem, then?”

He looked at me. And I suddenly understood.

“You can’t be serious about that,” I said.

“I can and I am.”

“Then why ever have you sent Maret away?”

“Oh, believe me, we don’t want her involved. That’s the way the Cricklade incident started –poor William was involved in the sort of things that should have rightly been none of his business.”

That sounded a lot like a description of my life.

“I see,” I said.

And then I saw. I had been hearing it for some time without realizing it, the light and quiet steps, like those of a child. And a series of snapping clicks – I didn’t immediately realize what it was, but it sounded so familiar that I couldn’t help but remember the sound Nightingale’s cane made against the pavement.

It seemed to me that the darkness up the street was different, blacker, thick to the point of being violet. Gradually, the outline of his square-shouldered torso appeared from that darkness; then his long thin legs, and his feet in expensive leather shoes. But I couldn’t see what was up above the neck, between two curls of black glossy hair.

This was what Nightingale had hoped for all along. Of course it was. The amount of magic Nightingale and Trevelyan had used was bound to attract the attention of the Faceless Man. Combined with the impact of the ritual, it constituted a magical analogue of a V-2 dropped right in the middle of the city; quite naturally, he would want to check if this weren’t the beginning of an end. Which was why it was very probable that he was not expecting our showing up. The surprise factor was on our side – Nightingale counted upon it.

A droplet of sweat made its way down my temple. The night felt scorching hot, and it was definitely not the after-effects of the warming spell. I had a ridiculous sense of awful responsibility dawn upon me, like I was suddenly charged with looking after a whole crowd of little kids all by myself.

“A surprise attack, sir?” I mouthed. Nightingale took my hand and backed away a little, closer to the gully that had been formed when Trevelyan had blown his front staircase up.

“A surprise attack,” whispered he. “And you are to engage under no circumstances. You’re our black box, Peter. If something happens to me, you retreat, go back to Maret – she’ll help you to get to London – and give all the information to Postmartin.”

“Black boxes aren’t supposed to be black, sir,” I said. “They’re orange. To be easily spotted and recovered.”

He was visibly taken aback.

“I was _not_ making a joke,” he said. “Do you really think I have this horrendous late sixties sense of humour?”

I didn’t, and the truth was that it was _I_ who had made a horrendous late sixties joke, but I found it vaguely ridiculous that we were discussing this when the Faceless was walking right towards us. We’d have to shut up in a moment, anyway, or we’d risk dying in a rather Monty Python fashion.

“As a loyal constable, I’ll have to insist that you don’t have any,” said I.

He did not answer. He was not shaping a forma – he couldn’t do that without revealing our presence – but he was preparing to do it, if that makes sense, preparing to strike as quickly as he could. The sound of footsteps ahead of us was regular and unvarying; relaxed, as I could hear now that it was closer. There were some fifty feet between us and him. He couldn’t see us as of yet (he stood in the circle of light cast by a street lamp, while we were in the shadow of a pile of wreckage), but I couldn’t help thinking that Nightingale must have nerves of steel to wait for so long. I would’ve probably set the whole area on fire the instance I saw the Faceless.

The next moment Nightingale got a better grip on his cane and stepped forward. I watched keenly. The whole of the Faceless' body suddenly flinched, as if he were caught by the neck and forcibly pulled backwards; and then he _was_ pulled backwards, with his feet dragging against the wet pavement, and slammed against the nearest lamppost with a dull but unnaturally loud _thud_.

Without a sound he slid onto the ground. Nightingale made a small elegant gesture, opening his palms as if to reveal a blossoming flower. And up above the Faceless, there appeared and blossomed wildly a dark red shape – huge and full of white sparkles. The heat of it washed over me; the concentration of energy in it was staggering; unlike the loud and flashy magic Nightingale had used when destroying Trevelyan’s house, this was a quiet but deadly thing, and I watched as the slim black body under it flinched a little, as if wilting with the impact.

With a sort of horrified awe I realized that Nightingale was about to roast the Faceless alive. Or explode him – I wasn’t sure what the red sparkly thing was supposed to do.

But the Faceless had already recovered from the blow; his limbs uncurled slowly, his head rose a little way even against the wave of heat that should have by all rights destroyed him; relaxed though he might have seemed earlier, he must have taken precautions of some sort. And it wasn’t easy on Nightingale, either. He was noticeably paler than he had been a moment ago, and his hands were gripping the silver-top convulsively.

With an effort, the Faceless sat up, pushing the fiery sphere away. His hands groped at it as though he were blind; he was trembling.

And then it exploded in a messy and bright shower of sparks. All the lights went off. For a moment or two I saw nothing but darkness. Then there was another flash, much dimmer than the previous one, and I could make out the standing figure of the Faceless. He was leaning against his black cane, awkwardly, in a manner that made him look a little crippled, but he was vertical nevertheless; Nightingale seemed to be unable to do him any further harm.

“The Nightingale,” the Faceless said, and his voice faltered slightly. He sounded like an actor who forgot all his lines.

“A shrewd observation,” said Nightingale.

“You just have to fuck everything up, don’t you? How did you do away with Trevelyan?”

I had already realized the difficulty they both were facing: there was a very real possibility that neither of them would be able to defeat the other. But while the Faceless was perfectly willing to retreat, Nightingale would never allow him to. I feared very much it might be partially because of Lesley – and it was a sick kind of relief to see that the street behind the Faceless’ back was quite empty. I remembered the _signare_ in the flat of the late R. Williams. These little things were giving me hope, and I hated this hope to bits.

“You didn’t bring your apprentice,” said the Faceless. His lips hitched up.

Nightingale shrugged.

“At least I have somebody I could bring with me. And what happened to your lot? There aren’t many people left. You just keep killing them. One day you’ll run out of supporters.”

“Talk about the pot calling the kettle black.”

Nightingale reacted by levitating some thousand pounds of bricks and throwing them in the Faceless’ direction. The unfortunate lampposts were swept away, and a couple of old oaks had lost their footing and fell through the roof of someone’s garden shed. For a moment it seemed as though the Faceless was buried under that pile; but with a small tug of dismay I saw the bricks slow down, and fly up a little, and then stop in mid-air. They were not moving back, but neither were they falling on the Faceless.

Nightingale mopped his brow, frowning deeply, and, as if prompted by this frown, the wreckage flinched forward; but the Faceless waved his hand, and suddenly there was a long and excruciating crashing sound, and the next moment the bricks were dust.

It flew down in flakes, surreally, covering the street.

That was the moment when it occurred to me that maybe I had to start devising some kind of Clever Plan. _Extraordinarily Dumb Clever Plan_ , yes, I know, but the point was, I had to do something – _now_. It was fairly obvious that Nightingale was not about to win a glorious victory over our make-believe Moriarty; surely the next best option was to retreat and start scheming so as to defeat him in some other way (especially since Cricklade was no longer in danger of collapsing), but apparently Nightingale did not see the situation from quite the same angle I saw it from. His look almost suggested that he was ready to fight the Faceless to death.

And it was exactly the kind of thing my stupidly dramatic governor would do. Because he just had to behave like it was the War all over again.

You appreciate the difficulty here. I was thinking as to how to confront an incredibly powerful magician whom the man who taught me magic could not defeat. Not only that, I was about to break the orders given to me by a senior officer. But frankly, mentally I had already performed the “look how many fucks I give” dance, and the only problem I actually had to solve was how to approach the matter, actions-wise.

I didn’t think the Faceless would be impressed with my primary-school fireballs. Neither would my clumsy attempts at _impello_ help things; in fact, the only case in which I could have used magic was if I planned for him to die of laughter. This left me with what – a pile of bricks?

A physical attack. Suddenly, this made a feverish, insane kind of sense. The Faceless would never in a thousand years expect a physical attack, much like it never occurred to Voldemort that some hundred of Kalashnikovs would be more effective than any Avada Kedavra. Magic did tend to make people forget about other, more material things – like the possibility of being hit square in the face.

And then there was his staff. The source of magic, right? The one thing that prevented the brain of a practitioner from turning all cauliflower when subjected to the enormous strain that was fighting spells like Nightingale’s.

But of course I’d have to distract him first. If only I could ask Nightingale to do that!.. But I couldn’t; my own abilities would have to suffice.

I shaped the forma. It was nothing particularly complex, a third-order spell made of _lux_ and _aer_ and _congolare_ – I wasn’t even sure what it was supposed to do – but the important thing was that I was shaping it to be directed at the Faceless, a blow from the right. I tried to make a big deal out of it. I messed with it a lot, and I did something weird to the _congolare_ , for which I am sure Nightingale would have scolded me if he could.

Ultimately, I think what helped me was not my wit so much as the fact that the Faceless was thoroughly desensitized after his clash with Nightingale and quite simply failed to recognize my _signare_ (what with it being so much like Nightingale’s). And he was not trying to neutralize me when he conjured, lazily, a shield on his right – if anything, his actions were a reflex, a simple response to a superficial threat.

This enabled me to get on with the next part of my plan by running out from behind the wreckage and slamming into him like a cannonball, grabbing his cane with both hands and headbutting him in the face (as much as I could headbutt something I couldn’t really see). My forehead met with his nose; there was a crunch of bones, and I felt streaks of liquid running down my cheeks. The Faceless let out an agonizing cry, and it was an intense pleasure to hear it – it was an even greater pleasure to roll off him, and to look at him after I had taken his cane in both hands and broken it in two against the wretched lamppost.

“You’re welcome, you sick fuck,” I said. And I saw his eyes looking at me; from the vague blur of his face, the only thing I could see was his eyes, brown and cold and clear.

Everything was sound after that. I think my last thought was that I’d certainly get a Darwin Award for that clever plan of mine if I ended up dying.

I don’t think I’ll ever forget the look on Nightingale’s face. It was all contortion, a grimace of a man who watches something terribly fragile and precious break into a million tiny pieces.

I was lying with my cheek against the sand, the water streaming past my face and soaking my hair; the air smelt sickeningly with mud and jasmine flowers. And he was holding my shoulder in a bone-crushing grip. I don’t know at what point he had called the ambulance – right after he reached me, I think – I don’t remember.

“Bloody idiot,” said he. His voice hitched. “Don’t move. I’ll have you investigated for insubordinate conduct.”

“Very funny,” whispered I. It hurt to speak, too, but his threat struck me as unfair.

“Shut up.” Nightingale was positively failing to breathe properly, and he was giving strange lengthy sounds that were somehow the most heartbreaking thing. “Peter. Good God. Don’t you dare bloody speak.”

I obeyed, and I think it frightened him, because my shoulder hurt worse than ever. Or maybe he wanted to keep me awake; in this case, he achieved his purpose – I could hardly lose consciousness when I was under the impression that somebody was trying to rip my arm from its socket.

I suspected that he was leaning his forehead against the knuckles of his hand, because his breath was tickling the naked skin of my forearm. And he was whispering something, falteringly, but with an odd persistence. I strained my ears.

“-no civilian casualties,” he choked. “If we don’t count Williams, but he had died some time before we came to the city. Well done. It’s over. Do you hear, Peter? You did that; it’s over."

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> i just feel like this story is this thing lying in the corner that goes _kaboom_ every time somebody approaches it. Oh, well, I did want to write a trope-y action-adventure with lots of worldbuilding.


	7. Chapter 7

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> heeere we go. My ideas about the Faceless' background were inspired by [this wonderful fic](http://archiveofourown.org/works/917364).

That Lesley had turned meant, among other things, that I no longer got hugged on any kind of regular basis. Oh, sure, laugh about it all you wish, I imagine it must sound ridiculous; unfortunately, touch starvation doesn’t care if you are a big tough copper who can do magic. It really, really doesn’t care.

And I might have had my ideas about my relationships with other people, but all of them were suddenly rendered irrelevant when I awoke to the sensation of someone's fingers ruffling my hair. It was a bit like being handed a cone of ice cream after a couple of months on nothing but boiled broccoli. It was wonderful, and for a moment I had no wish to know where I was, or how I had come to be there – or who was sitting beside me, for that matter; I just wanted them to remain completely still.

A minute or so passed in this manner. I debated with myself as to whether to open my eyes.

On the one hand, I suspected that it would prove to be hideously embarrassing. But on the other hand, my instincts were starting to kick in, and I was anxious to find out more about my surroundings (especially since it was pretty clear that I was not in any of the places where I'd have expected myself to be).

No doubt I would have eventually come up with a tactful way to hint at my being awake. What prevented me from doing so was pain; only now had I realized its presence – and it was acute, too. And I mean _surprising_ levels of acute here. I couldn’t help but blink, and of course there was no way I could feign sleep after that, so I didn’t even try.

It was Nightingale sitting on the edge of my bed, his palms pressed against his knees. And I’d been right; looking at him _was_ hideously embarrassing. Though I found that I was thankful it wasn’t Stephanopoulos – the image of her petting my head would probably have haunted me to the grave.

“Hello, sir,” I blurted. The one upside of the pain was that it prevented me from looking like a bunny high on cocaine, which hopefully meant that he wouldn’t realize that I was being unreasonably happy about stupid things.

He didn’t look as though he were about to realize that, either. It slowly dawned upon me that he was perfectly unaware of anything save for the fact that I was back to my senses; and, though he had withdrawn, he was contemplating me very closely, his eyes strangely soft.

I gave him a rather lopsided smile. The numbness of my left cheek vaguely hinted at the intriguing possibility of my having willingly slammed my head against a brick wall multiple times (which I sincerely hoped had not been the case).

“What-“ I began, and was immediately forced to lower my voice, continuing in a sharp whisper, “how? I’m damned if I remember a thing.”

“The Faceless Man,” said he, even quieter than I. “As you call him. Just how much do you _not_ remember?”

The Faceless Man. Right. Right. That hadn't been me slamming my head against a wall, that had been me headbutting the fucker in the face. Hard bones he had had there, too.

“Oh, I think I remember _that_ ,” drawled I.

I had attacked him. Barehanded. I hadn’t even tried to Taser him. Quite unbelievable.

“You… you killed him in the end.” I eyed Nightingale hesitantly. I wasn’t sure of that, but there was something- something-

_Do you hear, Peter? You did that; it’s over._

“I did,” shrugged he. He still spoke in a whisper. I realized, with a little start, that his face was quite drawn; he was far from being as elated as I’d been moments ago. But it wasn’t that he experienced qualms of conscience about having killed. He was-

_Bloody idiot. I’ll have you investigated for insubordinate conduct._

...I should've probably realized that earlier. Now it made me feel simultaneously very smug and very guilty.

“I’ll have to call the doctors in a moment,” said Nightingale, levelly. “I don’t think being awake for long shall do you much good. And you’re in pain, I expect.”

He was very serious about that; words of protest died on my lips. I knew, besides, that he was right – it was true I was beginning to get dizzy with pain and confusion; I already had difficulty thinking of the questions I had wanted to ask. And I had had many questions, about the Faceless, and about Trevelyan, and Maret, and that curious expression on Nightingale’s face.

“I gather that you are fine, at least,” I said, settling back onto my pillow. He nodded automatically, as if not quite understanding what it was that I had asked. “Is the Faceless in the morgue?”

“Whisht,” said he. That must’ve been a quirk of Dr. Walid’s – I was pretty sure Nightingale would have never used the word otherwise. It sounded rather outlandish coming from him. “Don’t ask questions, I’ll tell you the most important things. The Faceless’ body shall be transported to London for Abdul’s examination. As it is, there’s little to go on. He’s no acquaintance of ours; there were multiple IDs found on him, all of which are being traced, but I don’t fancy that’s going to yield any interesting results.”

My eyelids were sliding shut even against my will. Nightingale’s talking to me didn’t help – when lowered, his voice acquired a lulling, velvety quality to it.

And there was the tune of the wind outside. It mixed with Nightingale’s words, with the cool of the blanket against my ribs, with the smells – not of medicine, not many modern hospitals smell of that, but of faint and pleasant things, of something sweet – and I couldn’t make out everything, just the occasional sentence or two that my brain deemed important. _Maret’s doing fine. They had you in surgery. Were surprised, too, that you looked like you had been hit by a train, only somehow it hadn't done that much damage._ I made an effort to look at him; he grinned at me cunningly and a little shyly. Of course. He must have done quite a bit of healing magic back in the heyday.

_They’re saying you’re out of danger now._

“N’ce,” murmured I. “Sir, I wanted to ask-“

At this point I had zero idea as to _what_ the question was, so I fumbled a little.

“This London thing,” I continued, haltingly. Nightingale was silent. “I wondered, how does it feel when somebody talks about London in your presence? Is it like being called by name? Like a thousand voices calling your name on every corner?”

He breathed sharply.

“Peter.”

“What?” I tried not to slur the words, but I wasn’t doing very well. “I’m just curious-“

“Why on earth are you even thinking about _me_?” he asked, sounding helpless. “You’re literally just out of surgery, and about to be sedated again. That’s the most ridiculous thing I’ve ever heard of.” He sprang to his feet and walked closer, I could judge from his footsteps. “You aren’t delirious, are you?”

And to my utter astonishment, he gently kissed me on the forehead. Nightingale and his old-fashioned methods of checking for fever!

He might’ve short-circuited me there. My brain refused to deal with this situation further, and in a moment I had blissfully blacked out.

 

The next time I was conscious of my surroundings, there was no Nightingale, a lot of food, a bouquet of daisies, and a thick blue plastic file lying right on top of me. I pushed it away, and it slid onto the floor with a quiet _clank_.

It was damn great to no longer be in pain. I was still a bit limp, to be sure, and I didn’t quite trust myself to walk, but at least I could direct my attention to problems other than “what do I do when every inch of me hurts”. At present, these other problems included a) being terribly hungry and b) wanting a lot of questions answered ASAP.

The first matter was resolved satisfactorily when I discovered that somebody had actually cared to get me some decent jollof rice. Like, wow, that had been a great gesture on their part. I wasn’t sure if it had been Maret or Nightingale – or somebody else – because judging from the assortment of things on the small table standing in the corner, I had had more than one visitor during my period of unconsciousness.

And then there was fruit, and some newspapers, and a surprising number of notes wishing me a swift recovery. It made me feel slightly better, mostly because it meant that I had not accidentally spent the last couple of decades in coma.

Biting on a sweet yellow apple, I pulled the duvet over my ears. All was well for now, or at least as well as it could be. Some things just couldn’t be helped, like the fact that I appeared to have grown the proverbial three-day stubble which, I knew, made me look like a black version of Indiana Jones.

That was when the blue file on the floor had caught my eye. Maybe somebody had even been considerate enough to realize that I’d be dying of curiosity here.

I leant over from the bed, reaching for the thing, and with some difficulty was able to grab it. It was smooth, slick, and a little grainy. With a little surge of excitement I realized that it contained even more papers than I’d expected; if that was all about things that had happened when I had been out, there must have been a perfect burst of activity. But who could be causing that turmoil? With the Faceless dead and Trevelyan being in that _condition_ of his?

The first leaf was a note scribbled in intimidatingly huge letters. I made myself read it – there might have been something important in there, too, apart from the usual set of good wishes.

 _Dear Constable Grant_ (it went),

_I’m sorry I couldn’t come in person! Am still busy managing the consequences of Williams’ murder. Though I daresay the task has become considerably easier. Everyone is busy wondering what in the world has happened to Blossom Street._

_(Please get better soon. Your DCI was scared something awful. Every time we’d mention you, he’d get all tough. The poor guy doesn’t know it’s the most surefire sign.)_

_I brought you some things you’ll probably consider important. A lot has happened since you got yourself hospitalized._

_P.S. I’m very sorry about Trevelyan. Your DCI says he had no choice, I’m not sure what it means. It seems to have upset him a lot._

_Best regards,_

_DS E. Maret._

I had a feeling that maybe I should just call someone and not read this file. Maybe put it away and wait till I was on my feet. But also I knew that it was too late; I already understood _what_ had happened to Trevelyan that had “upset” Nightingale; already saw it in my mind’s eye. And, indeed, in hindsight there had been a kind of awful inevitability about it, that which people mean when they say “doom” or “destiny”. Only of course it had been neither.

I leafed through the pages, the newspaper clippings falling out and landing on my duvet. Something about the Blossom Street episode (it was only now that I learnt the name of the place Nightingale had so thoroughly messed up), something else along these lines, more of the same. High-res pictures stretching across the pages, headlines like screams.

There it was, a laconic notice from the birth-marriage-death column. It was more than a little stupid to hope that Trevelyan had fallen in love with someone Nightingale had disapproved of, so I didn’t. I knew what I’d see.

_William Robert Trevelyan, died on the 22nd August. All enquiries to –_

The address given was that of the local station. No “beloved husband of X”, nor “sadly missed by Y”. I found myself hoping really badly that it hadn’t been just Nightingale behind that announcement; it did sound a great deal like something he’d have written. He, for one, wouldn’t have been able with clear conscience to list himself as Trevelyan’s “friend”.

It might just be, I thought, that nobody would’ve been able to say they had been a _friend_ of Trevelyan’s. He had been one of _them_. A loner, as Nightingale had said.

I looked at a couple of other texts dealing with Blossom Street. The wild theories put forward by the yellower papers didn’t really cheer me up.

Then there came another one of those things: this time a full-blown article, albeit an obituary not so much as an incident report. It confirmed what I had already been suspecting with a headline printed in enormous Times New Roman – “BODY FOUND ON THE SHORE”, and a smaller line saying “Police Suspect Suicide”. Drowned himself, of course he did. What the fuck? Couldn’t he just retire? Were there not enough places in the world that were not Cricklade?

At the bottom of the page there was a little of Maret’s writing, much smaller than it had been on the note, as though it were squeezed into that corner by the sheer weight of the article. _NB: The enquiry is now closed, confirmed suicide by drowning_. After which I felt like lying down and sleeping for a thousand years or two, because I was 1000% done with everything.

But something kept me from doing so. And it wasn’t the emotional stuff, not exactly – not that I told myself to toughen up – no, it was more of a suspicion. What that note said now sounded weird, somehow. “A lot has happened”? Trevelyan’s death was an event of such importance that the Blossom Street articles could hardly count. Maret, if no one else, knew that my injuries were a direct result of that incident and that I was aware of the majority of the details. And she wouldn’t have written “a lot” to mean the satisfactory resolution of her troubles with the Williams affair.

There must’ve been something else, then. As big as Trevelyan’s suicide. Or bigger.

So I resumed my leafing through the endless articles. There were others reporting the discovery of Trevelyan’s body – it had been a big thing for a small town like Cricklade, and maybe, who knows, people _felt_ that he had been important in some way they couldn’t really understand. But I paid them little attention now. They could tell me nothing new.

The very last page in the file was a print-out, something that looked a lot like the layman’s idea of a personal record, with a photo and all. I took it.

For a moment I doubted if the Faceless’ spell hadn’t caused me to become just as nuts as poor Trevelyan.

She had long reddish hair, and wore a turtleneck sweater despite the fact that the day was sunny; her eyebrows were reddish, too, even lighter than the hair, with a hint of gold showing. And yet I could swear, _I could swear that she had Lesley’s face_. Lesley’s actual, real face, Lesley’s smile, and blue laughing eyes, and an expression that showed that she had not a care in the world.

The timestamp said it had been taken a month ago, in July.

I was vaguely thinking that maybe it was a fake- though why anyone would want to make a fake like that was beyond me-

and then I was fumbling with the page awkwardly, inspecting it, trying to read the text and not quite succeeding in converting the weird inky symbols into solid and vital meaning.

At last I made something out. “Margaret Walmsley”, it read. “Service done: (and here was the date I knew at once as that of the destruction of Skygarden); payment made: (and another date, some two weeks after that). Currently lives: Miami, Florida. Status: independent.” And in the corner, another of Maret’s notes: _From Williams’ hard drive. Recognized her but don’t know for sure. Decided you’d want to look into it before giving the info to our people. Tell DCI Nightingale? I’m not sure how to approach him now. Especially if this is going to add to your accident and William’s death, whoever this Ms. Walmsley is._

But she wasn’t Margaret Walmsley. She was Lesley. I knew her hands, her legs, her posture – her almost military bearing, back straight in a natural, non-strained sort of way. I knew her _face_. I looked at it and I think I might have laughed aloud, laughed along with that smile, and then teared up a little. I was experiencing an awful, deathlike happiness.

Lesley wasn’t evil, not one of the bad guys – never – never. She had not been working for the Faceless. Not trying to destroy us. Not training to be the Faceless’ successor.

She had taken what she wanted and now- _Miami, Florida_. Good grief, trust Lesley to pick the best place. My head was suddenly crowded with stupid stereotypes. The Sunshine State. Oranges. Alligators. Florida, Where the Sawgrass Meets the Sky. I bet she likes it there, I thought, especially the oranges, and I was laughing again, until suddenly I wasn’t.

It was like the beginning of A Tale of Two Cities. I felt awful, and I felt marvellous; I was unhappy, and at the same time I wanted to grin; I hated Williams, but I was almost thankful to him for his bad habit of collecting dirt on his powerful friends.

And, above all, I had no idea what, if anything, I’d tell Nightingale.

 

When Nightingale started our next conversation by saying “his name was Victor Slater, and he was a member of Lesley’s support group”, I almost thought he knew.

I was due to be released, and I sat on the bed opposite of him, listening to his account of the results of the latest dive into the Faceless’ background. We neither of us were particularly eager to talk about anything else, and mentioning stuff like Trevelyan’s suicide felt fantastically awkward. In other words, everything was back to normal – or as close to it as it could be now. But Nightingale still contrived to have visibly cheered up at the sight of me, a phenomenon at which I marvelled more than a little.

“His name was Victor Slater,” he said then, “and he was a member of Lesley’s support group.”

I let out a little _oomph_ and dropped the apple I was eating.

Clearly Nightingale saw nothing unusual in my reaction, because he ignored it almost forcibly, keeping a proper professional poker face.

“Not his real name, of course,” he continued. “But he’s not like me. Not like William. He’s young.”

It was odd. I suppose I'd expected it to be a revelation of sorts. And I had never thought that the Faceless Man would be that which he turned out to be – meaningless, a name with no impact, just a person. Faceless.

“Was, sir,” I said. “ _Was_ young.”

“That’s what I said,” he parried with the same unreadable air. He was doing his impersonation of a rock again. “But I think this case is largely over. There remain other Crocodiles to be investigated, true, but I should think none of them are much of a threat with the Faceless gone. Not yet. And we’ll prevent any of them from becoming dangerous enough.”

“And then there’s Lesley.”

There was a long and awkward pause.

“We haven’t got any leads on her,” I said at last, and immediately doubted if I hadn’t committed a horrible mistake. “It is as if she has not done anything since- since Skygarden. As if she isn’t there at all. No traces of her in Cricklade.”

Nightingale nodded slowly. He looked sad, but not in the least bit suspicious; apparently I was doing a very good job of sounding natural.

“Yes. It is so. I suppose it is a matter of time, Peter. If she does any magic, we’ll know soon enough. But if she keeps to herself, if she does nothing unusual, I do suspect that finding her shall be as good as impossible. Especially if she changed her name, her occupation- her hair colour-“

He did not finish, but he could have as well said _her face_. And he was echoing my discoveries with such uncanny clairvoyance that I felt like taking that faux personal record page out and giving it to him, much like a delinquent kid would apologize willingly to an adult who clearly knows all about their mischiefs (the age difference would have been just about right, too).

But it had been a decade and a half since I had been a kid, and I had my own ideas about Lesley. So I kept still.

And it turned out that Nightingale hadn’t finished, either.

“Yes,” he repeated, looking at some completely random point in space that was nowhere near me, “this case is largely over.”

And he fell silent.

“You wanted to say something, sir,” I reminded him after a minute or so of such pastime.

“I did,” he said. “I’ve been thinking. I’ve been thinking about retiring, Peter.”

“Retiring!”

I could hardly blame him for not answering; it wasn’t a terribly meaningful remark.

“As in, from the Met?” I tried carefully. “Or like that guy from Sussex?”

“Like that guy from Sussex,” said Nightingale, with a tiniest hint of a smile. “I’m not sure how it would work. Maybe I’ll have to resign from the police, too.”

I tried to digest that information. At this point I had a bit of a problem with statements like that. It was as if someone incredibly powerful had decided that my life no longer needed anything resembling stability, happiness, and common sense.

“You’d need a successor,” I said. “Right? Everyone does.”

“I have thought about that too,” responded Nightingale, unwavering. I had feared he would say that, because I knew what it meant. “Or rather, London has. I’m afraid I have rarely noticed it before, but it has changed during the last decades. O, London has changed!” And again, he stopped and wouldn’t speak for a while. “It is so… different. So diverse. New. It needs freshness like it needs air.”

He looked straight at me now. But I wasn’t sure I was glad of that.

“London likes you,” he said. It sounded like something from an ancient fairytale.

“What made you think I’d ever agree, sir?” I asked, incredulous. Even then, a part of me supplied a perfectly logical answer: I was a practitioner, if a lousy one; I knew of genii urbium and had some idea of how the bond worked; and there were only my parents to be reckoned with. Maybe they wouldn’t mind having a god in the family.

He shrugged a little.

“I thought you might want to. But of course I am not counting on that. If you refuse, it’ll find somebody else. A less fortunate choice, maybe, but still better than-“

“It is because of Trevelyan, isn’t it?” I asked suddenly. “Not me. The retirement thing.”

He gave me a sour look.

“It isn’t _about_ Trevelyan. But his case has showed me clearly that we can’t stay on. We need to go. In the face of change, the only way for us is the way out.”

“And the Faceless Man,” he continued, “Lesley… Trevelyan’s death, they are just symptoms of a bigger thing. Industrial use of magic! Remember, you said that Cricklade is its people; well, do you really think Trevelyan represented the people of Cricklade, or that I in any way resemble the average Londoner? Magic is changing, Peter. The world is changing. But we are not.”

He meant all of that, too. And I felt a great deal worse than I had been feeling before.

We were silent again, for a long time.

“Listen, sir,” I said finally, in a firm voice, and leant forward towards him. “I’m really sorry about Trevelyan. But I think both he and you have got it all wrong.”

Nightingale looked at me as if he thought I was insane.

“You’ve got it all wrong,” I repeated. “How genii urbium work. And maybe I’ve been mistaken, too – a little, at any rate. It is not about people as such. It is not even about ideas. See,” now I spoke with an odd sense of urgency, “what happened to Maret and Trevelyan is by no means a coincidence. I had just rolled with your notion that Trevelyan was incredibly sensitive to the moods of the inhabitants of Cricklade. But did it never strike you as weird that Maret has never been of any inconvenience to us? That she herself admitted to experiencing no great discomfort?”

“It did,” he said quietly. “I thought-“

“You thought that she’d not felt it well enough because she’d just undergone the ritual! Or because she could suppress it. And then the affair of Blossom Street has supposedly lightened her burden. But the truth is, it is all rubbish. The people of Cricklade are no hivemind. Most of the time, they have no common will, no common desire, nothing approaching a _personality_.”

“Wait,” interrupted Nightingale. His face reflected a mixture of incredulity and admiration, which I took to be a good sign. “Are _you_ lecturing _me_ on the concept of genii urbium?”

“If you wish,” I said, grinning at him. “All I’m saying, sir, it is not about people. It is about a – a presence, I’d call it, a solid cultural shape of the city. It is not a thing that is easily changed. Easily influenced, oh, sure, but it is no more than passing moods. There’s something morbid in this idea of a person-crowd symbiosis, anyway. If it were real, it would have power to destroy minds.”

He was pressing his gloved hands together, his gaze fixed on me. Maybe I was being unusually eloquent, but I found I didn’t really care. Not as long as I could make his eyes look less dead.

“And London,” I said, “has a cultural shape that has existed for centuries. If anything, sir, you’re way too _young_ for that. Maybe things change; maybe there is another “presence” now – I wouldn’t know, me not being a god and all that. But it cannot possibly erase what has existed since the Roman times. Londinium, Shakespeare, and stuff. You don’t believe Shakespeare is about to be forgotten, do you?”

Nightingale was silent, but I didn’t think he meant to answer with a "no, I do”.

“Well,” he said at length, in a voice that sounded really low and a little strangled, “what do you propose, then? Dividing the power? It is an unheard-of thing. I have not the foggiest if it’s even possible.”

“We’ll work it out.”

“Peter-“

“It is about choice,” I said, and extended my hand to him, because it felt right to do a sort of ritual handshake, and also because I needed a non-ritual one, too. “Lesley, the Faceless Man - they are individuals, not a trend. And Trevelyan, he had a choice, too. Everyone does."

Slowly, as if his fingers did not quite obey him, he took off one of his gloves and held my hand in his.

“You sound like an advocate of the American Dream,” he smiled. And I smiled back.

 

Yes, there was the American Dream in it. Oranges and alligators. Where the Sawgrass Meets the Sky. When Nightingale was picking me up in the Jag to drive me back to London, I thought about that - I thought about ripping Williams’ papers to shreds and burning them in the sink in the hospital bathroom. About the flames that would be bright and big and would leave ash stains on the porcelain.

I suppose you could call it a temptation. I'm not sure I was tempted; it was clear to me that Nightingale would be the last person to harm Lesley. And we certainly needed to share that knowledge if we were to achieve anything meaningful. Though I did hesitate when I thought what it could do to him, what it would be like if that situation would never end, dragging on and on for the remainder of his - our? - seemingly eternal life. But when all was said and done, I knew what the right option was, and I stuffed the papers back into the blue file. There was a small sticker on it now, a note I had placed there myself, identifying it as item of evidence number 335.

It all felt like the Day of Judgment, when some were forgiven, some were blessed, and some were forgotten. And then there were others, those who were destroyed.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you all <3 Hope it was fun to read.
> 
> I'm very grateful for your comments and for the concrit! I'll go and make the wording less awkward in a couple of places (though avoiding altering the thing in any major way).

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [Cover for "Dies Irae"](https://archiveofourown.org/works/2381063) by [Makoyi](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Makoyi/pseuds/Makoyi)




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